Week 11 and 12
Once again, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. For week 11, we had a playtest planned at main campus on Wednesday, so Monday and Tuesday were spent implementing all the new mechanics we had planned.
On Wednesday, we set up a table at the UC and began playtesting.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, gathering playtesters is surprisingly difficult. Despite offering (FREE!) candy, most people didn’t seem interested. In the future, it might make sense to organize a more official playtest with people signing up beforehand, but even then I’d imagine it would be hard to get people to donate their time, without offering monetary compensation.
However, over our 2 hours there, we managed to get 10 playtesters, and it was very helpful getting feedback from people outside the ETC. For example, we found that less than half of people reported playing mobile games at least once a week, which was significantly lower than the number we found within the ETC. While CMU students might not be any more representative of general population than ETC students, it was still useful getting some neutral, outside perspective on our game.
In general, people seemed to like the game, but they weren’t passionately in love with it. None of the people we interviewed said they spent money on in-app purchases, but there seemed to be some willingness to spend money, especially if the money went to a good cause. The biggest finding, however, was that between money going to a good cause, having a chance to win money yourself, and playing a game that’s fun, fun was the most important factor. And this same result played out again when we did a playtest at the ETC in week 12.
On Monday, we met with our client to discuss our UC playtest, and discuss plans for implementing our lottery elements.
We discussed several examples of rewards structures currently used by games, and asked our clients which they preferred. They seemed to strongly prefer what we labeled the “Counter-Strike” model, wherein the player finds crates or other items while playing, and then can spend money to “unlock” them. Our idea for this was to have seeds scattered throughout the level, which the player could either plant for free to get basic in-game prizes, or they could spend money for better in-game items and a chance at winning real-world prizes.
So far, all our tests had been without any actual lottery elements in them, so this week our goal was to have them up and running by our playtest on Friday. However, this would involve not only a random number generator lottery element, but also seeds (aka tickets) to collect, a way to earn and store prizes, as well as a menu to organize it all. Another important feature that we hadn’t added yet was the step tracking, and we wanted to get that up and running as well.
As we discussed all these changes, we realized another change to the core gameplay would be necessary as well. Things had grown too confusing, with health and mana and points and timers… So we decided to simplify things, and make scoring all about how much you could clean within a time limit. While this was significantly simpler overall, it required going back and undoing some of the work we had done over the previous week. And, because of this, we couldn’t get all the lottery features implemented in time for our Friday playtest.
In the end, however, I believe this turned out to be the right decision. When we playtested on Friday, people were having a lot more fun than they ever had with our game. While part of this was probably due to the impromptu leaderboard we implemented (a feature we now definitely want for the final version) a lot of it was also due to our simplified, streamlined mechanics. We gathered lots of useful feedback; and while we still clearly have some room for improvement in terms of explanation and difficulty curve, we now finally have a game that’s fun enough to ask the question the lottery is most interested in: is this a game you’d potentially play every day?