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Week 11/12: Narrative Playtest feedback and plans for the Hopin Playtest

Due to the CMU break on April 15-16 (for Spring Carnival), work for weeks 11/12 was combined. Broadly speaking, Weeks 11 and 12 saw iterations as a result of the narrative playtest as well as work towards a Scaled up Playtest on Hopin. The goals of the Scaled-up Playtest are to evaluate how well the current experience would scale up to ~40 players and also to test the platform of Hopin. 

Things that worked from the playtest are as follows: 

  1. Players still felt transformed/interested in the subject. 
  2. Artifacts were still interesting/cool to look at
  3. Players liked the new Acting/Story elements
  4. Players had an thought-provoking open discussion

Things that didn’t work well from the playtest are as follows: 

  1. Players felt unprepared/overwhelmed by the Scope of all Nuclear Testing
  2. Players felt confused by the many perspectives and what each perspective wanted from them (i.e. Their department boss, Dr. Nolan, themselves as people unfamiliar with the subject). 
  3. Players wanted to continue seeing Objects after voting for them 
  4. Players wanted better graphical visualization of the data 
  5. Players noticed but recognized Bugs/missing assets in the build. 
  6. Players also did not know what the Department of the Interior was

Planned work for the next playtest broadly broke down as follows: 

  1. Finish 3D assets and Complete look and feel pass on all 2D UI elements (Art)
  2. Narrow the debate/clarify what the players need to argue or persuade each other about (Writing) 
  3. Change the Department of Interior to ICAN, an NGO that won the 2017 Nobel peace prize for convincing 135 countries to ban nuclear weapons development (Writing) 
  4. Allow players to access artifacts after voting for 2 (Programming) 
  5. Automatically create Google Sheets graphs after players submit information (Programming) 
  6. Set up Hopin for the next playtest with the help of our Client Raul (Production)
  7. Recruit 16 – 20 playtesters for the next playtest (Production) 
  8. Invite SMEs to the future playtest (Production) 

Overall the project is grappling with good questions/problems. We’d like to make a convincing case to the faculty at Softs (start of Week 13) that the experience is largely ready/executable with 40 players. Our decision to be actors in the game is also turning into a liability at times since the work of creating the technical infrastructure for the game is distinct and different from the work of performing the story of the game well.