Game Craft Chronicles

For my playtest, I recruited my cousin who is luckily in our target demographic! He is a 19 year old Freshman and plays games on a regular basis. He has also participated in our previous feedback survey so he was already familiar with the concept of the game. The test was administered asynchronously, I sent him the instructions, game link, and survey through a text. He was able to send the survey back to me within a few hours.  My cousin is in the middle of finals right now and sending him the game to play at his convenience was the best way to accommodate his schedule. Because this was done through a text, I did not have a traditional experience of running a playtest. In the future, I would definitely try to set up a time where I can be with the player as they play through the game so I can answer their questions more directly and experience their reactions.  Even though I wasn’t able to be there when he played, I think he still was able to give quality feedback.  Here a...

  Designing a game solo vs with a team are totally different experiences!  Overall, I have enjoyed the process and it has been awesome to see other approaches to design. I think we work well as a team and have been able to problem solve through challenges such as figuring out how to translate practical geography lessons into a game and pivoting our original idea after Dr. Larsen’s feedback.  During our group meetings, we all worked together and each had a say in the narrative design and mini quest assignments. However, I primarily contributed to the storyboarding and prototyping. For storyboarding, it was mostly taking the narrative design from Nicholas and translating that into what it would potentially look like in our prototype.  The part that was the most difficult in my opinion was that for long time we did not have a solid idea of what the game was going to be about.Then, because of the way we divided up the work, there were times where some of us were not able...