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!