This week was a busy one for designers and developers alike. On the development side, these were our main priorities:
- creating a stable build for ETC playtest 2
- implementing the profile section
And on the design side, this what we focussed on:
- preparing to Skype with Ms. Juliana Bwire
- preparing playtest documents for her
The ETC playtest was with 4 children. We had made several UI changes from the previous iterations and this playtest was a great opportunity to test them. We also tested the first iteration of instructions, as we realized that party mode challenges were not being completed successfully due to lack of instructions. Another important piece that was added this week was audio, and we found that it lifted the mood of our game and made it so much more fun to play!
The playtest went well, and all four children really enjoyed playing the game!
One essential feature of our game that had been in the mockup stage for a long time was finally added to our game -profile. The profile section is where players can see their achievements (i.e. all the badges they have earned), their newsfeed (i.e. all their recent activity) and their Chamy (i.e. they can customize their little chameleon host and give it new skins). We were excited to see this feature finally be implemented, although we could not playtest it with the children in this week’s playtest.
Amy, Laxman and Ruchi were busy this week setting up all the required infrastructure for the meeting with Juliana. Talking to her before the Skype session, via email, we came to an important conclusion: we would not be able to actually conduct the playtest in Tanzania. So we had to make sure we gave her adequate information on how to conduct playtests – specifically, how to playtest our game, and what she should look out for. Creating these docs helped us immensely in understanding our own playtest process, and it’s something that we’ll all do earlier in the semester next time around!
