Project 02
Tabletop Gameplay
In Task 2, students will conduct primary research to gather data that informs their tabletop game design. This involves selecting suitable research methods—such as playtests, observations, interviews, and surveys—and justifying their choices. Students will collect and organize data to support their game development. Weekly tutorials will feature gameplay sessions on Tabletop Simulator, where students will present their progress and record feedback from facilitators. The final submission will consist of a presentation of the collected playtest data and findings.
Playtest data
Total unique players: 37 (including our team)
We initially picked Google Forms as our main method of collecting playtest data since our target age demographic of 13-26 are a group of fairly busy people that might need some time before they can fill up our form with meaningful insights. Having it in digital form made it more accessible for those that played but also for the internal team to document and make changes remotely as collaborators. The way that the service can switch between showing responses in summary, question and individual-based formats helped us mentally visualise, analyse and act on the data better. There are a variety of ways we can present the questions (1 to 5 scales, checkboxes, long answer tests) in the survey to make filling up the form as short and as easy looking as possible. From this we were able to collect both quantitative data and qualitative data to check the progress the game was making towards the finish line.
After consulting with Dr Charles, he suggested aggregating the data into a table that acts as a tool for evaluation based on the main features that the game would deliver, being Player Immersion (covers the immersive aspect of the experience being both interacting with other people and the story of the game), Learning Curve (seeing how much the learning process took away from the experience of playing the game), Smooth/Dynamic Gameplay (checking how well components were working both together within gameplay) and Replayability (which looked at the positive aspects that brought people back for more since retention is such an important KPI that keeps a game alive and kicking).
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We kind of faced a problem with ensuring that everyone was answering the survey (20/32 people actually filled it up) since we wanted to keep their answers anonymous. The same would apply to in-person questioning since while we didn’t want sensitive information to be accidentally recorded while playing, we didn’t want to create a tense atmosphere where people aren’t exactly allowed to slip up. And so, the in-person questioning table combines both the responses from the Google Form (based on which playtest they fell under) and casual questions we had asked whilst playing (it also made it possible for people to update us with thoughts that they didn’t add to the form when they had filled it up hastily).
We wanted our team to be testing the game intermittently, especially before introducing changes so that we could agree on whether certain changes actually affected our vision (which other playtesters may not have considered) for the game, disagreeing with the ideas that opposed it. We also wanted a positive and constructive environment for our game to collect feedback and improve so we started off with local playtesting with friends and people we knew in specific situations where youths would usually be itching to play a card game of sorts. Because they were people we knew, we were more comfortable in collecting information from them as well as playing with them. We would then move on to playtesting with strangers or people we knew less well within Taylors campus grounds to represent the wider public playing the game when we felt that we had eliminated most of the problems and were just looking for the right flag to stop at.
In-person questioning
Google form summary
sudsprite spin playtest form responses
Link to Sudsprites’ Spin Playtest Form (Responses) Google Sheets