The Work This Week
Playtest, continued
By the end of last week, we had contacted the ETC faculty who helped us send playtest invitations to people outside the ETC who are interested in our game. We managed to connect with four high school students, our target audience, to try out our game.
The main goal of this playtest is to find out whether the game’s goal is clear, if the economy is balanced, and if the tokens are spent as expected. Learning from past experience, in the faculty meeting Monday this week, we showed the playtest feedback survey to Ruth and Heather, who gave lots of useful advice on making it more useful and clear. One core takeaway for us was: make sure every question does what it’s supposed to do.
By the end of Friday, the team has gathered at least eight individual’s feedback, and we studied it, we realized that the current onboarding process, combined with tutorials, may not be working as expected due to the unsettlingly lengthy dialogue. To fix the problem, we have agreed upon separating the story and tutorial apart: the help information for each system will be displayed on-need by clicking on a question mark button placed on the system’s UI panel.
Fleshing out systems
Apart from the continuing playtesting, the team has been working on connecting the achievement system to the ship customization system, where skins would be rewarded to the contestants who do well in answering CTF challenges – yes, another way to motivate them into the contest!
Client Meeting
This week’s client meeting was mainly about us going through the playtest feedback while our clients were giving suggestions on how to make better use of the CTF tokens.
One additional important takeaway from the meeting was edge cases where players answered hard challenges and became token high rollers and coast through the game. While it could lead to an unbalanced situation, this is unlikely and also they will have earned it at that point. We don’t want to punish players who are doing well with challenges.
The Plan for Next Week
As the Soft Opening in week 14 is ticking on, we want to make sure all game components are in place and polished as much as we can. We will be carrying out the third round of playtest with real questions implemented to see if the game succeeds