Week 10
The biggest event of the past week was Playtest Day on Friday. It was very helpful getting our game in front of a large number of non-ETC students, since one of our main goals is to make a game that’s fun and accessible to a wide range of people. In general, people seemed to really like our mechanics. They immediately understood that they were blowing a leaf around, and spent a lot of time cleaning and exploring, even when that wasn’t their goal. Unfortunately, this was a sign of our biggest problem: people didn’t understand exactly what they were supposed to be doing. This was a clear sign that we needed to improve our instructions, but once we explained the concept to people they seemed to understand and enjoy it.
In addition to observing players and seeing what was unclear and confusing, we also handed out Immersion Experience Questionnaires, as well as additional questions aimed at getting peoples’ opinions on free-to-play games and the lottery. The survey will be more useful later, when we can compare the results across multiple playtests, however discussing the lottery and free-to-play games gave us some interesting insights and perspective on the lottery. One player in particular compared our the idea behind our game to Chuck E. Cheese, saying that people are used to paying money to play games with a chance at winning a prize, even if that prize isn’t nearly as valuable as the money they spent winning it. Getting these perspectives from players is one of the most interesting and exciting parts of this project.
On Monday, we met with our clients to discuss our playtests, as well as our feedback from Halves. One point we raised was that the faculty still seemed to be unclear on what our project was really about, and we hoped to clarify with them once and for all what their goals were for this project. They summed it up very nicely by pointing us to Jane McGonigal’s “Reality Is Broken”, explaining that the original goal of the lottery is to leverage play to enhance the planet. Their hope for our project is to look for ways for the lottery to “reorient” itself towards that goal, figuring out what types of play appeal to younger generations.
This was very helpful feedback, however as we continued to make minor improvements to our core game, we found that despite our newfound direction, we were still having trouble making our game fun. To be honest, I think we were all growing increasingly frustrated, seeing the semester slipping by with no clear direction in site. However, on Thursday, we had a very informative meeting with Jesse Schell. He played our game for the first time, and helped us put into words the problem we were having: the game lacked “triangularity”. The idea is that a game must give the player an option to either play it safe for a small reward, or take a chance at a big one. As it stood, there was really only one option: go out and explore, and no reason for the player to take a risk. So, regrouping, we began to discuss what we could do to rectify this problem. And, surprisingly, it all came together with one idea: adding points.
At the most basic level, adding points gave players a way to compete and measure their success, something many of our playtesters asked for. But, as we continued to discuss it, we found that this one change could have a wide range of ripple effects. For example, Jesse had mentioned the game lacked a sense of danger, a sense of urgency, so we decided that adding a timer would address that perfectly. Players could play it safe, exploring slowly and cautiously, but then they’d risk running out of time, or at the very least not maximizing their score. And, since time was now a factor, we decided that monsters could slow you down and affect your time rather than damaging you, something many of our testers found confusing. Similarly, we could tie our powerups into both points and time, some potentially giving you a score multiplier, and others freezing time or helping you explore the level quicker.
Once we had all these new ideas, it was only a matter of breaking them into tasks and assigning them to different members of our team. We now have a good set of goals for the next week, and we hope to have a build ready to test on Wednesday. Hopefully, with these new features implemented, we can begin asking testers if our game is meeting our clients’ goals, namely being something that leverages play to enhance the planet.