After picking up my prints of the cards from the FabLab on Friday, I set to cutting them out and backing on to card. Before leaving campus I managed to pick up some thick sheets of card from the print room. This was useful as the cards were printed in a large roll they were quite curved as you can see below. Once I had cut the cards from the glossy paper sheet, I then measured and cut out backs from the card to give the cards were structure.
Obviously after all this I was expecting to physically test the cards with a small group and give them the instructions and the cards and see how they reacted to the game. However, the people in my bubble that I had lined up to test the game were busy and so I had to rethink my testing strategy. Due to COVID I wasn't comfortable meeting up with friends outside of my bubble to test the cards, especially seeing as the mechanics of the game is dependent on switching cards between players.
Since the pandemic started I had taken part in some online interactive games with friends. This got me thinking about if there were customisable card deck platforms that I could use to test my game.
After some research I came across the website playinycards.io, which is a customisable tabletop game site. They have preset games that you can play with others in chatrooms, however, they also have a customisable card deck option.
The website is quite simple to use, there is a bulk import function to load in your different card designs which speeds up the process a lot.
Once I had my card deck loaded in, it was a simple as shuffling and dealing out the cards and sending on the room link to friends so that they can join in.
Testing Sessions
I had 3 testing sessions using this platform and they were quite successful. The platform is a bit fiddly in terms of allowing other players to switch cards between hands but during game testing I developed a work around. Before playing the game I sent the instruction card to the testing participant so that they could try to understand the game themselves. There is no in built chat or messaging system within the playingcards.io platform, so during the testing sessions I called the test participants over the phone and on Teams calls.
The following are some examples of the different testing sessions.
The main takeaway from testing was that participants really enjoyed the interactive learning environment that the game creates and responded positively to how the gameplay was so directly linked to the story. They found that instructions were easy to understand and that the colour coding of characters . There was only one participant that had a small issue during the start of gameplay but quickly recognised the fault and was able to rectify it without my help.
I'm really pleased with how these testing sessions went, it seems that all the kinks that had been discovered in my first round of game concept testing earlier in the semester have been fixed. Participants didn't have trouble matching coloured suits together, which was the main pain point from the previous testing. I am very satisfied with the playability and ease of play that is achieved from the deck and feel it works really well as a game overall.
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