Week 14: New York City and the Games for Change Festival
This week we headed out to New York to make our final calibrations and have the game be played live at the Games for Change Festival.
We arrived in New York on Monday, before the Festival began, to test our final build and calibrate to Washington Square Park. We spent a lot of time in the NYU library to put the finishing touches on our game. Janet, Lisa, and Tim took this time to boost our social media and try to create some buzz about our game before Thursday. The Festival began on Tuesday, and we continued to test and make sure that everything was in its place. We got to attend a few of the talks at the conference and meet some really interesting people. We spent some of the time at the festival meeting people and trying to recruit players for our game on Thursday. Wednesday we attended the Come Out and Play games, which also focus on outdoor games. Despite the wind, we had a lot of fun playing those games and meeting other outdoor game developers. Jesse and Drew made special announcements during their talks to promote our game, for which we are eternally grateful. Wednesday night, we made sure to go to bed early so that we could get up early and be ready for our game’s debut.
On Thursday morning we woke up bright and early and arrived at Washington Square Park at 8:30. It was a clear day, albeit a little chilly, but we were confident that the game would be successful. With our brightly colored balloons, we were prepared for the players to join us in the park. Though we did not have over 200 players, we did average about 15 players per session, which ended up being around 60 players overall. The players seemed excited about our game and were eager to give us feedback at the end. Here is a video from the game being played in Washington Square Park:
On Friday we came back to Pittsburgh and took the weekend off. Next week, we plan to assess the results from the festival and prepare that information to be used in our final presentation.
Week 13: Softs and Final Preparations
On Saturday, we ran our game at Carnival, the spring festival on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus. Our intentions with this playtest were to run the game with a large number of people, test the scaling of our game, and to test the flow of gathering and organizing a large group of people before our game. Unfortunately, we did not have as many players as we were hoping to have, but we still learned some valuable lessons. With the result of the playtest in mind, we met on Sunday to discuss what needed to be tweaked and what else needed to be implemented into the game. The biggest takeaway from Carnival was that we really needed to focus on advertising and promoting our game to get enough players to play.
Since the Games for Change festival is happening earlier than Soft Openings and Final Presentations at the ETC, we had our Soft Openings with the faculty on Monday. We used the footage that we took from our playtest at Carnival and presented our game to the Faculty. They gave us good feedback and advised us to hold another playtest with more players. They advised us to really focus on promoting our game during the festival to ensure that we had players come and play our game. They also advised that we be sure to give players an opportunity to take action outside of our game.
After Softs, our team was busy with final preparations and final tweaks to the game. Minor changes to art and sound assets needed to be implemented as well as website features for before and after the game. We also set to work making promotional materials such as an instructional card for the Games for Change program and T-shirts for us to wear in the park so that players can find us. Our producers were very busy finalizing all the plans for the festival. We also decided to have one last playtest before we left for New York with as many players as possible.
On Friday we held our last playtest at the ETC. We had about 50 players and ran the game twice. We found that our scaling was off and that players could finish the game too easily. We found a couple issues with certain browsers, but overall the test went well. We continued to work after the playtest and made some final changes to our post-game survey.
Next week is the Games for Change Festival. We are taking an overnight Greyhound on Sunday to get to New York City on Monday. We will spend Monday calibrating our game for Washington Square Park and making any other necessary changes. Then we will spend the rest of the festival promoting our game before it runs on Thursday morning April 24th, from 9:00-11:30 am. We cannot wait to run our game and show off all of our hard work!
Week 12: Testing, Testing, Testing
User Playtest day at the ETC occurred on Saturday. Despite the nice weather we had had earlier in the week. It rained all day on Friday and by Saturday, it was cold, windy, and all the ground was muddy and slippery. Since we had playtesters that were older, we did not want to risk anyone’s safety, so we decided to recalibrate our game for the top of the parking deck. The top floor of the parking deck was open and a large enough space for people to play in. However, as we discovered while we were calibrating, it was excessively windy up there making the cold air unbearable. After all this, we decided it was better for us to not run our game on Saturday, but rather run it later in the week when it would be warmer and sunnier.
Monday started with a conference call with our clients at Games for Change. We discussed ways to improve our game as well as ways to garner attention at the Games for Change Festival to ensure that we have enough players. After this, we booked our tickets to New York and began planning how our game would run in Washington Square Park and what kind of promotional materials we would need to prepare.
Following the weekend, the weather forecast said that Thursday would be warm and sunny, so we decided to run our next playtest then. We spent the early part of the week preparing for this test. We made some minor changes to the game’s mechanics and prepared a survey for after the test. On Thursday we had around 30 players, including students and faculty, and ran our game twice. Though we did run into some problems with people’s phones not working, overall it ran smoothly. Immediately following, we met with our advisors to discuss the results.
Simultaneously, we were making the final preparations for our Soft Opening/Final playtest, which would be occurring the coming weekend on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus as part of the Carnival festivities. We made promotional posters that we posted all over main campus as well as around the ETC. We also took the results from our playtest on Thursday and implemented changes as quickly as we could to ensure that the Carnival test would be a meaningful learning experience. We spent most of Friday implementing changes and fixing bugs. Friday night, the team went outside and tested the final build before Carnival.
This weekend, we plan to run our game at Carnival and will hopefully receive great insight and feedback. We will then begin preparing for our Faculty Soft presentations, which will be occurring on Monday. Next week is the last week before the festival, so we will be very busy making all the final preparations before the Games for Change festival. We cannot wait to showcase all the hard work we have done this semester!
Week 11: New York and Testing pt. 2
Over the weekend we took a quick weekend trip to New York to test our current build in the actual space of Washington Square Park. We also had a few other questions we needed to answer and assets we needed to test. The trip proved to be very useful as it informed us about how people would move in the space and what we needed to change to accommodate that. It also became clear that we needed to change the main map a bit so that it was easier to know where you were in both the physical and virtual space. Since it rained the entire time we were in New York, another important thing we figured out was that our game can in fact be played in the rain.
The weekend trip was extremely useful and we came in on Monday ready to work hard. Based on what we learned about the space and the map, we knew we had to make some changes on the art side. So Jack began to overhaul the map and the icons. We were able to adjust tech parameters on the fly while there, but we also had to make the final changes once we got back. We also began work on redesigning and implementing the remaining events.
This coming Saturday is the User Playtest Day that is being held at the ETC. We wanted to get as much into the game as we could before Saturday so that we could test as much as possible. With that in mind, we worked hard as a team to create and build the remaining events and create an introduction for our game. The introduction sets the tone of our game and informs the player of their role within the game. We wanted to make a statement at the beginning about hunger and then ease the player into the game.
On Friday, it was all hands on deck to finish preparing for the User Playtest Day. We implemented all the new art and sound assets into the build and began writing the survey for the playtesters to fill out after the game.
Next week, we plan to finish implementing all the features into our game and use the information from the playtest to tweak our game. We are planning on running our game up on main campus as a part of the CMU Carnival. This is substituting as our Soft Opening as it will be the only time before the festival that we will be able to run it with a large group of people. Then we will have one week to make the finishing touches before we head off to New York again for the Games for Change Festival!