We were lucky enough to take part in the ETC’s Playtest Day. We gathered everyone up in a room with premade Twitch accounts and put on a brief show to fit within schedule. The audience was younger than our usual playtest group, mostly teenagers, and had a fun time. Most of our results confirmed some of our assumptions and theories, and it was nice to see people actually using Twitch chat, especially those who used it frequently outside of playtesting. They wanted more control of mixing and matching content, enjoyed hearing laughter in the room, and went on “trends” of certain content paths, like making every situation about McDonald’s. This session was short and sweet.
In terms of content produced, we also had a very smooth ideation to implementation week for a music game. In this game, a special audience member will be chosen as a “DJ” for a round of an improv scene. They will solicit (or choose on their own) three broad-genre music pieces to play over the scene to change the mood. Examples include Romance, Heavy Metal, and Sad music. We want to explore a) how audience members respond to “captains” being designated the leader for a short while and b) more indirect ways to influence scenes. Internal playtesting of this seems to have gone well, and audio balance work made sure its enjoyable on the viewer’s end as well. Time will tell when we get to playtest this.
In terms of scope, we are beginning to realize how near the end will be. We’ve been in content production mode for the last couple of weeks, and need to step back and organize our thoughts soon. We believe we’ll have one more game to be made over the course of the next week and a half before committing ourselves to soft openings, final design documentation, and sharing our work with the world.