It has been a busy couple of weeks. For week 11, we had a playtest on last Tuesday and on Saturday here at the ETC. So beginning of the week we implemented all the new mechanics we had planned. We also implemented more Twitch mechanics which makes the viewer more engaged in our experience.
Over the course of the playtests we realized that people really enjoyed the whole idea of voting on things to change the game and they really liked how we changed the UI. From the earlier playtests we understood that we needed a better way to convey that the vote has started. We introduced this new UI in the game so that people can easily read the instructions and vote for the things they want in the game. As of now, people can vote on change of weapon, music, abilities in the game. We also found out that in general people seemed to like the game, but they weren’t passionately in love with it.
We discussed several examples of reward structures currently used by games, and asked ourselves what would millennials enjoy more. We knew going into the next week that we needed strong moments in the game where viewers are compelled to watch and emotionally attach themselves to the success of the player.
As we discussed all of these changes, we realized another change to the core gameplay would be necessary as well. The delay between the player side and what the viewers see was hurting our experience badly. So we decided to work on those in the coming next week and make it more juicy. We are mostly going to work on making these moments stand out to the viewer and build one dungeon which has these moments, which Julian brilliantly mapped out.
In the end, however I believe this would be the right direction for us. When we playtested on Saturday, people were having a lot more fun than they ever had with our game, a lot of it was also due to our simplified, streamlined mechanics. We gathered lots of useful feedback; and while we still clearly have some room for improvement in terms of explanation and difficulty curve, we now finally have a game that’s fun enough.