Hello!
I’ve bundled these two weeks together as week 12 is a shortened week, consisting only on Monday & Tuesday. This post while generally talk about preparations we made for a trip to Northgate Middle School on Monday, November 21st, along with the summary of the trip itself.
Preparation
We started work on the build for Northgate by focusing on building out deeper interactions with individual characters and streamlining the Finale and integrating it more into conversation with our engineers.
We were able to get some additional feedback on the game when students from Howard University stopped by our project room. As a group, they played through most of our build and we discussed individual design choices we had made. The students were relatively receptive to the content and messaging of our project, but as a team we need to ensure we don’t lose sight of our audience being 8th graders. Some of the feedback might therefore lead us down a path to improve the game for college students, so we want to ensure we are thinking carefully about how best to incorporate the feedback as it relates to our intent.
As for individual updates to the game itself, we implemented the following features:
- RC now hides during the finale, so it feels more interactive with what is going on.
- Introduced several animations for the player and the engineers.
- Updated engineers to have movement/following behaviors as opposed to just being magnetized to the player.
- Changed the power core to be red by default and blue when fixed.
- Began implementing “tasks” within the finales that are game changes triggered by dialog choices.
- Zun has dialog then leaves after completing Finale 3.
There were a number of other features we either started implementing or discussed how we would implement that I will continue to discuss in future posts.
For the playtest, we want to try to get through the whole game AND get feedback on how the students play our game. Our expectation is that they will play the game pretty differently than we (as developers) would play or even our faculty/ETC playtesters.
Playtesting at Northgate
For our playtesting at Northgate, we had essentially a single class period to introduce our game, get students on our WebGL build, play through everything, and then run any other activities.
Starting off, we thought we were going to be in a good spot with no identified problems. We were able to test on the teacher’s computer that the build was accessible. However, once students started trying to access itch.io (the site where the game had been hosted) they ran into a school content filter. Only a couple of students were able to access and playthrough our game, but we were able to have an 8th grader playthrough on the previously tested teacher’s computer. This discovery initiated our switch to our new domain http://powercorevalues.etc.cmu.edu/ which should not get blocked by the content filters.
From there, the playtesting actually went relatively smoothly. Players expressed a variety of level of understanding as to our messaging. Some players questioned why RC was so mean toward Zun, while other players immediately went to “RC is a racist”. This difference in recognition of the content is exactly what we were planning on. Some students will recognize our setup and imagery more easily because they have more experience dealing with these sorts of situations in real life.
The students also seemed to play very quickly. Some students did read through our dialogs and spend a lot of time working toward understanding through the context we provided. Other students were barely reading and got through the scenes extremely quickly. In general, we felt the students were relatively self-motivated to make progress. Most of the time, they did not want to sit around and wait. They were much more likely to just click things to see what would happen than our previous playtesters.
After playthrough of the game, we had students answer a survey about the game. Some of the highlights of the survey were that students now found RC significantly less trustworthy (as opposed to our findings at playtest day), students were confused/didn’t necessarily care about the background of their character (specifically referring to them being a ship captain), and players were generally able to match Nanoi and Zun to their pictures.
After the survey, we did a short activity with the students. We gave each student one paper cutout of Nanoi and one paper cutout of Zun. We then went through a number of examples within the game and asked students to fold their characters if they felt that character would’ve been hurt by the scenario we described. Overall, we found that students felt the situations described in our game were significantly more hurtful toward Zun than Nanoi, which was our intent.
Playtesting at Northgate was helpful to get feedback from the 8th graders and was a great way to check that our content was landing, which it generally was.
Moving Forward
Again, week 12 was a relatively short work after the playtests on Monday. We feel like we are in a good spot overall as far as our development, now we just need to bring it home in the last few weeks.
At the end of week 13 on December 2nd, we have a workshop at Northgate with teachers and educators from around the city to play through our game and get perspective on how the workshop accompanying the game might be run. Prior to that, we have softs, where we will talk with the faculty and especially our consultant, Ruth, to get perspective on ways to improve our project before finals.
Thanks for reading,
James from STEMspire