I’ve had two playtesting sessions with my game, one this past Wednesday with a few folks at the game salon, and another with a co-worker’s kids. I’ve also tortured my fiancé and received some feedback from him. Overall it’s been pretty consistent and I have some objectives I’ll be trying to meet before the week is up:
Problem: There is a lack of consequence within the game play. Basically, why should I chose one color over the other? There needs to be something to influence the players actions…
How to address it: I’m going to add some think/say bubbles to the creeps. I’ve compiled a list of potential things they can say in the game as they walk around, such as “green creeps don’t belong!” and “but we’re all just creeps”… I’m hoping this will give the player a hint of what the colors represent and at least they’ll be clued into what the result of the game might be.
Problem: Status bar needs numbers or another way of letting the player know who is winning
How to address it: I’ve been having trouble getting numbers to appear next to the status bars, so one thing I may do is indicate where the bars end so they player can know how close their side is to winning/losing.
Problem: Lack of sound and background
How to address it: I had the discussion of background with Rafael, and we determined that I needed to be comfortable with the idea of a white background and assess whether or not a background would actually add anything to the game. One of the play testers noted that he thinks a background would make it a little less boring. I’m not sure what to do with this, so I’ll dwell on it for now. As far as sounds, I agree. I’ve been able to get some stock, license-free music from Ted, so I will be picking sound out for the game implementing it this week. One interesting idea I had from a play tester was to cue in the player what was going on through music… so if the evil creeps were winning, ominous music would play, and if the good creeps were winning, then happy music would play. I could see how this could potentially be awkward, so the transition from one to the other would needs to be pretty subtle…
Problem: Color choice of creeps
How to address it: On the group of boys I play tested with this weekend, I asked their opinion on the creep color. I showed them brown/yellow creep art, and they thought that although the current colors were arbitrary, using the brown/yellow colored creeps instead would likely be offensive to people. I agree - I think that using blue/green/orange abstracts it enough and the player won’t necessarily have the same potentially negative reaction to an evil blue creep as opposed to an evil brown creep. The flesh toned creeps would be way too loaded…
Other ideas resulting from play testing:
- Find a way to reward the player with more bits of information as they play…
- Different levels that would represent precincts/states. Player would see blaance of the result of game play between levels. Overall result of all levels would be an cumulative election result. I love this idea but not sure I have time to work with it.
- Give an option for the player to see the voting platform of the candidates… not sure if would reveal too much.
- Campaign signs and trumpets… (led to my idea of creeps saying things to the player)
- Win lose screen could be an animation?
- More booths and/or more creeps (had a total of 12 creeps that were re-spawning for testing sessions)
