We are able to present our games in accompany to the John Hansard Gallery’s ‘Who's Got Game!’, a small themed exhibition to play a range of classic board games from Board in the City. Another playtesting session where we can test out the game by possible standby volunteers or visitors interested in our game.

https://jhg.art/events/whos-got-game-3/

Our game build will be selectable from a dual launcher with our paired up game, Kamioshi, within these cabinets much like an arcade machine. For this playtesting, the focal surrounds the observational details that we might’ve found from playtesters. Not much interruption would be involved from us, but rather relies on the player’s own understanding of the game mechanics and controls from the hints and guidance we gave. This can be revisited again through Science Fair Feedback , learning from the feedback improvisation, we reviewed this on our previous large playtesting sampling. Overworld HUD and strengthening the hint to initial action to open the sketchbook and learn about the general controls are part of the method we executed.

To take note for the playtesters, as the main intention for this John Hansard event is to promote board games to be enjoyed. Visitors that came are in the demographics of either children and older people that don’t know how to use computers, as galleries are generally not very popular among the young people. The rest of the playtesters are from our fellow peers. As of the playtest samples gained in this session, we summarised some common action patterns that caught our attention:

Positive

• Firstly, players get to explore with the core mechanics of the game more compared to last time with the help of the overworld HUD, reminding them how to control the game mechanics
• With more volunteers from different age group added into our playtest sampling, it takes great notice that our game is heavily favoured by younger audience as maybe their first option to play, further deepens our thought to make the game experience more inclusive and easy to be picked up for these type of players
  • This could be the saturated and bright-coloured theme of the game atmosphere presents

Concerns

• We have found that some of the playtesters still didn’t know how to control their movement through WASD keys, even if it’s indicated on the tutorial page. This is predominantly observed from the visitors that came for the Who’s Got Game!
• Another signify of this kind of action goes for adjusting their point of view (POV) perspective on where to look at through moving the mouse
  • Possible steps to avoid this could be including a move mouse to control the camera in the tutorial page as well
  • Or we implement a tutorial near the start of the game to get players familiarise the typical controls