For this week, we went over our playtest feedback, and also got to meet with an actual representative of Pittsburgh!
Playtests
We conducted two playtests on Wednesday and one playtest on Friday, and overall, they went quite well! In the prep room, playtesters were consistently quiet, which is actually a good thing for us considering we had iterated on the content there to be more interactive. We interpreted the lack of discussion as an indicator that our content was engaging for the players. We also found that during the discussion portions of the game, players frequently referred back to the content in the prep room, and used it to drive forward the conversation.
We did also discover, however, many things we could improve in the prototype. For example, many playtesters stated that the text scrolling speed was a bit slow for them at times, and we found that sometimes we did not provide enough cues for when players had to look at the mobile screen. After learning about that various small tweaks we could make to vastly smoothen out the experience during the Wednesday playtests, we spent Thursday implementing those tweaks before playtesting again on Friday. To our relief, we found that those little fixes made CivRep much easier to play than before!
Now that we had tested the newly iterated prep room content and found that it worked, we could now move on to converting the last portion of the game, the voting section, into singleplayer.
Meeting with Councilperson Strassburger
This week, we also got the chance to meet with Pittsburgh City Council Member, Erika Strassburger. We quickly shared our project and game with her, before diving into a discussion about what it’s like to be a city council member in real life. We learned a great deal about how council members reach out to their constituents, how constituents reach out to them, and what the social dynamic is like in the city council. Lastly, when we walked through the game with Councilperson Strassburger, she said that the game quite accurately captured what it is like to be a representative in local government. She even mentioned that she would be happy to help to help our client, Ron, by connecting him with people who could potentially help out with the future development of CivRep. Needless to say, our team was quite happy about how our meeting went!