This week, we finished a playable version of the game. We organized a play test. The purpose of this play test was to identify potential problems in the game’s mechanics and design, and to find solutions to known problems. Based on the play test results, we made some improvements on UI.
Playtest
First, we found a person with no gaming experience and a major unrelated to games and computers to help us test. Secondly, we found three persons with different professional backgrounds and ages who all have game experience.
Since we haven’t finished the tutorial yet, we gave a brief oral introduction before the player started playing the game. We observe their reaction during the playing of the game and ask them three questions:
- What is your perception of our game?
- What is the exciting part of this game?
- What is the frustrating/confusing part?
Then we make note during they played the game and answered our questions.
Based on the reaction, perception and frustrated that they have, we conclude some problems and opportunities:
- Players didn’t pay attention to the SDGS.
- They expect to see some explanations of SDGS
- Player pay more attention on the value of the card instead of reading the content of the card
- They are confused about how to win the game and how the game will end.
- They love the visual feedback of the city when they play a card and hope the visual feedback that city brought can be more obvious.
- They want to make the game harder so that they can play more rounds.
Solutions
Because players didn’t pay attention to the SDGs when playing the game and pay more attention on the value of the card instead of reading the content of the card. We improve the card design by getting rid of the value of the card. Players can see the explanations of long term effect and question mark and related SDGs.
In order to meet the client’s needs: to make people more aware of the concept of SDGS, after the player plays a card, the relevant SDGS will appear on the screen.
Also, many of our players are confused of how to win the game. They asked questions about “what is the final goal of this game? Am I lose?” To solve this problem, we have an initial thought about how to win games. Because client doesn’t want us to show the bad result of a city, we decide not showing the bad/good results but show the effort of the players have.
Tutorial
