Week 3: Playtesting our paper prototypes and preparing for Quarters

Based off of the game concepts we isolated last Friday, this week we not only created quick paper prototypes based around those concepts, but also playtested them with both ETC and EA Staff in the building in order to determine how well they leveraged a State Share-esque mechanic.

The Work This Week

Since last week we divided up the prototype concepts between each team member, we were able to create 4 paper prototypes to test on Friday. Below are some detailed design breakdowns of the concepts we created:

While our Virus vs. Cells concept can be seen in the documentation above, we weren’t able to transform it into a paper prototype due to some of its features not really lending themselves well to a physical embodiment. As such, we decided that a digital prototype would work better for this concept, though we would have to work on that after Quarters since it would take a little bit of time to develop.

Client Meeting

We presented the above concepts to our client this week in an effort to see which of them struck her as utilizing State Share the best. Overall, while Erin was intrigued by all of the concepts we presented, the Virus vs. Cells prototype seemed to be the clearest evocation of a State Share game, although she did urge us to document the other concepts if we could.

Playtesting

Playtesting for our paper prototypes commenced on Friday after our client meeting, from which we were able to get a whole lot of user data and game design feedback from what we had built. We’re still parsing through a lot of the feedback right now, as it’s a bit difficult to separate comments that are specific to certain elements in each game vs. ones that identify a glaring flaw that is related to the “sharing” (i.e. State Share) mechanic in each game, but we will delve more into our findings next week.

The Plan for Next Week

Next week, we will start building our initial digital prototype for Virus vs. Cells and dig through our playtesting feedback to see which paper prototype we can build upon further!