Week 13 was spent running some final playtests before going into Soft Openings!
Playtests
One thing that had been challenging for us this semester was playtesting with our target audience, university students. We had been primarily playtesting with ETC students so far, and wanted to reach out to a different audience in order to see how our game would do.
So, over the weekend, we reached out to our client, and had some of his students from UPitt playtest with us, in order to see how our target audience would react to our game.
Luckily, the playtests were a great success! The playtesters consistently mentioned that the game and its content was engaging, and that they got a much better understanding of local government and the legislative process thanks to the experience.
Soft Openings
For Soft Openings, we followed the following agenda:
- Introduction to our Project
- Live Demo of our game
- Talk About Deliverables
- Discussion and Q&A
Feedback
We got a variety of feedback on our project, and here are the ones that came up consistently in our discussions with the faculty.
Speech text sound effects is fun / annoying / interesting / distracting, speech text animation is too slow/too fast
We got a lot of mixed feedback about the speech text, ranging from its sound effect to the speed of the text animation.
Lack of a failure state/cannot NOT pass the bill
In our current prototype, players cannot choose to not pass the bill. If they do not have enough support, they are forced to redraft until they come up with something that enough people liked.
Art style and content felt incohesive
Some faculty pointed out that the cute art style did not seem to match up with the serious content matter being handled in the game. Others talked about how our art in the main screen and mobile screen sometimes did not seem cohesive, and that the large variety in fonts could make the experience harder to digest for our players.