Quite a bit has happened in such a short amount of time! In just a week, we have gone from a very basic prototype at the end of week five to having a (near) fully playable version of our game.
Week six started off with us all knowing what we needed to do thanks to our two-week sprint. We were planning to have 2 playtests during the week, the first to be held on Tuesday and the second on Friday. For the first playtest we wanted to go to Elizabeth Forward to test their overall reaction to the UI and interaction for the kitchen and basement, that we finished up on Monday.
Unfortunately, due to the weather during Monday night and Tuesday morning, Elizabeth Forward had to cancel classes for the day, which meant no playtesting for the team. This luckily was not too negative for the team.
Since we now had extra time during this week, we used it to improve the UI and to develop more of the rooms for playtest two of the week. This leads to the next playtest for the week. For this second playtest the goal was to test the overall game with the kids. With this goal in mind, we worked to have every room usable and to be filled with every appliance and energy using product we had used in the paper prototype.
So Friday has come and we have now gone to EF to playtest our game!
For the tests, we had two groups of three students, that we asked to play the game as a group. We saw a great reaction from both groups that we tested with and also from the teachers. The data that we were able to get from the playtest have been full of answers that we wanted for the questions that we went into the playtest with, but have also brought up some others that we now need to figure out in the next sprint.
We hope to start a new sprint Monday, and figure out how to make our game even better. Until next week, keep energy conscious!
-Team Joule