As I said in my last post, I decided to test BrainyAct again today. I think it went very well and overall felt smoother. I had Mia and Luke play today to allow for another set of new people to experience it for the first time. On that note, I did contemplate if time allowed for it to test with Shane and Ben again to see how speed of play improves with familiarity, but unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to. However, Luke and Mia seemed to have fun and gave great feedback on my second test of BrainyAct.
I will upload separately their responses to my questionnaire, but here I will reflect and comment further on what I may change, what I did differently today, and why I think it went better today then last time.
In my opinion today’s test went better overall due to a couple of things: 1) my cleaner look to the cards as I mentioned earlier. I think this allowed for the system of the game to run as it should rather than people being stuck on the functionality of the playing cards. 2) prior knowledge. Today I overheard others testing their games, giving insight to their testers prior to playing the game. Even though I remember Ames advising us in Game Design 1 not to do this, I figured in my second test of the game it was valid to give my testers a little bit of background on the game so they aren’t totally lost playing. So, prior to starting I briefly explained the rule set and what the colors in my game denote. On top of this, I gave a comparison on what influenced my game design, referencing Trivial Pursuit and Taboo.
After taking pictures, looking over gameplay, and overall having a good time testing, I decided that a couple things may be helpful. I think that adding into the ruleset a tips category or a line somewhere in there that references time and the lack of it that you have is important. What I mean by this is that I found that even after reaching the target goal of 3 cards in a category, the testers were continuing to take part in questions in a certain category they had already completed.
I think the next step is to make these revisions and work on the ruleset video I was mentioning prior. I think it would be really cool to use a QR code engraved into the inside of the box that pulls up a video rule set rather than a lengthy written one. This would allow for users to feel engaged and actually understand the rules rather than feeling the need to read a whole bunch.