Log 4

Over the past week, we’ve had the opportunity to put our game to the test - quite literally! Substantial Sustainability has gone through approximately three rounds of playtesting. While it doesn’t sound like much, I would say it’s quite impressive for a humble pre-production game!

Our second playtest was earlier in the week within the classroom setting: three of our peers (and one of our teammates) ran through the latest version of the game in approximately an hour. They offered fantastic critique and even helped us model out some possible solutions to our roadblock problems- for instance, rolling a die to determine which SDG would be lost in the event of a disaster. This was greatly beneficial for the team and helped us overhaul the cards to be as clear as possible. Curiously, this group was much more “offensive” than “defensive”; almost all of their money tokens were spent on SDGs, compared to our third playtest group that invested primarily in Risk Protections.

The third playtest was over the weekend - the Green Condition was given the opportunity to present our game at Gamer’s Universe, a convention made by teens, for teens that’s held at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. We jumped at the opportunity to get live feedback from people within our target audience, and all things considered, it went pretty well! Our demo was scheduled for the last two hours of the convention and things were winding down for the evening. I’m not sure what attendance was like in the earlier section of the day, but attendees were a bit few and far between. We were only able to get one solid round of playtesting in, but we had a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm from passerby!

The two teenage playtesters we were able to get were on the shier side (we didn’t get their names, either), and we weren’t able to ask them to take our feedback survey. Another player was an adult woman who was here with her family, and expressed a lot of interest in our game! Christa (hopefully I’m spelling that correctly) stuck around after the game to offer her thoughts on the difficulty curve and the layout of the game, suggesting that we cut down the amount of text on the Risk Protection cards for visual clarity. Interestingly enough, I believe the most positive reaction was from one of the library staff. Ms. Sandra was incredibly enthusiastic about our idea and spoke with our team for quite some time. She passed along her work email for us to keep in touch; while I don’t want to write it all out here, it’s exciting stuff!

Moving forward, this would bring us to iteration five of Substantial Sustainability. I believe the Risk Protection cards can be streamlined with their specific names on the back as well as the front (as there’s no need to keep them face-down, unlike the disaster cards, and it would be a little less cluttered to look at). We also need to write up a formal ending for the different point totals, which we forgot to bring with us to the Gamer’s Universe presentation. Whoops!