At Burrell High School, we ran an open Playtest. We presented groups of students with the tablets, and watched how they interacted. Students gravitated to Party Mode, and had fun playing with each other, playing through the game multiple times. The students would grab each other to play. Overall, the playtest was extremely successful.

We showed our product at the BVW Festival. This was also a great time. We had several industry professionals come around. Including Ken Rolston, the Lead Designer of Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. He reacted extremely positively to the game, calling it the best game he had played during his visit. This was a great honor, and speaking with him about game design was extremely insightful.

Unfortunately, we’ve had to do even more QA, fixing bugs from the Playtests. We are confident though that we now have a stable build to play with.

Finally, we went out for our Team Dinner. It has been a wonderful experience bonding with this team, and a great night to cap off the semester.
We are heading into Finals next week and will spend the weekend developing our presentation. We hope to see you there!

That doesn’t mean we didn’t do any work! We spent the days before Thanksgiving finalizing assets and finishing implementing the Profile. We also have begun the implementation of Onboarding.

This weekend will be the final push to implement the final features needed for Softs. But for now: Happy Thanksgiving!

We have struggled with UI Color this semester. Our UI uses many different palettes throughout the app, and there’s a lack of unity. We sat down this week and unified our palettes, using the Android Color Guide. We finalized a set of colors for our main menus, different topics, and interactive buttons.

We also worked on redesigning our Solo Challenges. Our attempt to get students to do a Solo Challenge away from the tablet have not worked. While students would be enthusiastic about the task during gameplay, they would not complete it later.

In our redesign, we focused on doing Solo Challenges in a similar style to Party Mode – the Challenge gives instructions, and is completed while using the tablet. We found that many great challenges we wrote did not have a clear winner (necessary for party mode) but our

We also finalized the design of our Host Character, Chamy. Chamy will guide the player through the game in an Onboarding segment, and serve as a metaphor for the players ability to create their identity in life.  The Onboarding and Chamy will be implemented next week.

Finally, we had a playtest at Elizabeth Forward Middle School with Eighth Graders. The primary focus was on testing the Solo Challenges. The test was very successful, with students undertaking solo challenges without prompting, and even repeating some of the games when they had the option to do other things.

• creating a stable build for ETC playtest 2
• implementing the profile section

And on the design side, this what we focussed on:

• preparing to Skype with Ms. Juliana Bwire
• preparing playtest documents for her

The ETC playtest was with 4 children. We had made several UI changes from the previous iterations and this playtest was a great opportunity to test them. We also tested the first iteration of instructions, as we realized that party mode challenges were not being completed successfully due to lack of instructions. Another important piece that was added this week was audio, and we found that it lifted the mood of our game and made it so much more fun to play!

The playtest went well, and all four children really enjoyed playing the game!

One essential feature of our game that had been in the mockup stage for a long time was finally added to our game -profile. The profile section is where players can see their achievements (i.e. all the badges they have earned), their newsfeed (i.e. all their recent activity) and their Chamy (i.e. they can customize their little chameleon host and give it new skins). We were excited to see this feature finally be implemented, although we could not playtest it with the children in this week’s playtest.
Amy, Laxman and Ruchi were busy this week setting up all the required infrastructure for the meeting with Juliana. Talking to her before the Skype session, via email, we came to an important conclusion: we would not be able to actually conduct the playtest in Tanzania. So we had to make sure we gave her adequate information on how to conduct playtests – specifically, how to playtest our game, and what she should look out for. Creating these docs helped us immensely in understanding our own playtest process, and it’s something that we’ll all do earlier in the semester next time around!

• Solo Mode’s UI was clear and easy to navigate, even for a nine year old.
• Students enjoy playing Solo Mode
  Party Mode was fun for students when they understood the instructions.
• Unfortunately the UI for the Versus part of the game was unclear, leading to students not understanding how to play Trivia. Some of the challenges were also played incorrectly, so
• Party Mode needs Audio Feedback so that all students can hear instructions, and the game has more of a ‘party’ feel.

This week we iterated on Party Mode’s design. We redesigned the interface of the Party Mode Trivia to make it clearer who was playing what slide. We also broke up instructions to make reading easier.

For Party Mode, we’ve designed a set of Modules that supports the various challenges that a Quest Maker may write. We combine different Play modes, such as Player Turns, Disqualifying Players, or Timing Players, to support gameplay.
Next Week we will playtest again at ETC, and we will test our iterations then.

Laxman introduced the client and the project’s premise and requirements. Adarsh covered the game design and flow of solo and party mode. Amy explained challenge and content design. Ruchi spoke about art and experience design. Kanglei spoke about tech difficulties and the solutions we’d developed over the semester. We also covered our metrics of success, our quarters feedback, and our schedule for the next semester.

We got some really good questions from the faculty members at the end of our presentation too – we were asked:

• how we would playtest in Tanzania.

we explained how we had begun the process of setting up a playtest. We will be speaking to OEF’s Tanzanian contact, Ms. Juliana Bwire. We aim to playtest with the Tanzanian children sometime in the next fortnight.

• how player stories were important to our design process.

we explained how walking through the experience in the player’s shoes was so helpful to us in assessing our design. This helps us since we don’t get to playtest often with children currently studying in the quest program, and so we have to use the second best alternative.

All in all, we were happy with how the presentation went! Our advisors, Jess Hammer and Jess Trybus, were also pleased with the way we presented.
But there was no time to celebrate – we went right back to developing and getting ready for ETC Playtest Day.

We had our ETC playtest on wednesday and it was also run along with Jesscia Hammer who wanted to give feedback on our works progress. The solo mode game play was very well accepted and understood by the playtesters. There was some confusion among the rules of the party mode when the playtesters started playing. After playtest feedback we realised the game mechanic though being solid was easy to understand. So we reiterated the party mode game rules with much simpler format

We also run playtest with highschool students on 10/23/15 and got various feedback on the solo made and started working on the UI iterations and few feature tweaks required as expressed by the playtesters.

Amy was working on few of the design elements for the game and the app. Kanglei was developing the app as required by the wireframes while Adarsh was building up the quiz mode for playing with two person. Ladera and Amy paired up on finalizing and converting the UI wireframes into workable design doc along side with Ruchi. This week was a development sprint and involved less design work on the game and more development work from the whole team