This past Saturday, the ETC held a playtest day where we were able to test our experience with several groups of ordinary people from the Pittsburgh community. For the day, we set it up to get groups of 12-18 playtesters in a room set-up similar to what we will have when we present in New York at the festival. We decided to try running two rounds of the game each playtest. It was to be a fully realized playtest with all the technology implemented: Twitch and VR. The headlines were distributed using envelopes with round labels on them, and the only part that was not as we intended was the narration. The MC read aloud the story to each part of the game instead of it being presented through the game itself.
After the first round of the morning, we quickly discovered many issues with our game. Here is a brief list:
- People had big issues with Twitch. Downloading and logging into the app was a serious ask of most audience members, who either experienced technical difficulties or didn’t understand how the app worked. Voting using the “#123” system was very difficult to explain.
- Guests weren’t communicating with each other. Most people remained silent throughout the experience. We were hoping people would type into the Twitch stream, but only during the third round of playing when we practically begged people to use the chat feature did anyone type anything.
- Both audience and VR player could not follow along with the story. After the first round of playtesting, we added a hand-out with the names of the various characters, but still, it did not seem to help.
In our recap sessions, the team decided to streamline the narrative to something much simpler, particularly, eliminating names altogether. Now, characters would only be referred to by their title (President, Finance Minister, etc.) and always with their home-city. Still, we needed a way to fix our first two big problems.
We discussed the pros and cons of creating our own custom web app. With neither of our programmers previously familiar with doing this, it felt like a daunting task.
We spoke with an outside expert, Nitsan Shai, an undergraduate Electrical & Computer Engineering student here at CMU with extensive experience in this sort of programming. He felt confidant in the ability to get a basic version of this working in a couple days and was willing to help us out. We decided to work with him this upcoming weekend to see if his astonishingly optimistic estimates were correct. We came up with a list of minimum viable requirements for this app:
- Log-in with code
- Admin triggered appearance of headlines
- Button to broadcast headline
- Realtime appearance of shared headlines
- Like button
- Screen clear between rounds
- Team name label
If our producer and undergraduate expert can get these minimum requirements functioning by Monday morning, we will make the switch to a custom app. Otherwise, we will stick with Twitch.
