This week we have concluded our first round of on site play tests. We are proud to announce that we were able to secure 36 high school students with a 3:2 ratio of males to females and we were able to perform extensive play tests sessions for each and everyone of them. We were also given the opportunity to play test at Central Catholic High School where we could test if our game worked in an actual high school computer lab. We want to thank all our play testers, faculty and teachers who have assisted us in our play test session.

The goal of our play test sessions were to

1)  Simulate the conditions which players will be playing in during actual competition

• They will be playing as a team of up to 5 students
• They will be playing throughout 10 days
• They will be visiting the game world intermittently
•  They will be playing either together on 1 computer or scattered on individual computers
•  They will be playing on browsers better or equivalent to Internet Explorer 9.0
• They will be progressing through the story at different speeds

2)  Simulate that they are of our target demographic

• They have some knowledge on computer usage and internet
• They are of both genders and any ethnicity
• They are students between the ages of 12-16
• They will choose to play the game instead of the basic problem viewer

We conducted interviews and had students fill out survey forms after they had completed level 1 of our game. From these interviews and surveys we were able to extract a surprising amount of information. We were able to identify many issues which would have pose a problem to picoCTF2014 if we did not find them as soon as we did. To our play testers, thank you for helping us and know that you will directly improve picoCTF2014 Hacking Competition.

We are also proud to say that out of 36 play testers we have a voluntary future play test sign up rate of 100%! And we will be calling each an everyone of them back for a 2nd play test session in late April. We as a team also found extra value in conducting play testing sessions. Apart from the wonderful feedback which would contribute to our game success, play test sessions also improved the productivity of the team massively in the weeks just before play testing. Since nobody wants to show off unfinished work, our team pulled together to develop amazing content within the given time, also, since nearly all our play testers were so enthusiastic in our play test sessions and gave us great responses, it mended our fatigue quickly and gave us greater motivation to continue developing content. All in all, it has been a wonderful week for team Daedalus and we hope to share more content online soon!