Final Playtest Report

After playtesting, a few new issues have been brought to light. Most of the players were liberal and had a general understanding of how vetoes worked, so there wasn’t much to be learned from playing our game. Most of the players felt an above-average level of control over faction ratings when deciding on what bills to pass and veto, though almost every playtester ended up with Public Approval being their highest score. Many of the playtesters did say they needed to compromise their own beliefs when passing and vetoing bills, which was supposed to be part of the game. The main issues rest mainly with the aesthetic of the game. When it comes to the game’s font, the average likability rating was 2.6/5. When asked to describe the look of the game, we got several responses relating to our vaporwave aesthetic, but among the comments were “unfocused” and “hectic.” The response to the music was deemed “average”, predictably because it’s just the same chords looping. For the next build, we will try to solidify our intended image, make the game understandable in terms of legibility, and add more flourish to the sounds of the game.

Week 9 Update

After a weekend of pretty much all of our team being unable to work, we have surprisingly the same amount of work as we did last week: polish, polish, polish. After going through some playtest sessions, we have new data available to look over, but just from watching over the shoulder, things don't seem as bad as we assumed in terms of balancing the game.

Other than that, there isn't much I can say about what we need to get done this week. Just a bunch of visual flourishes and other shit we can think of to add into the game. With most of what we need to get done already planned out, hopefully this shouldn't be too strenuous of a week.

Week 8 Update

Now that the groundwork is laid, time for polish and edits.

We have a lot to do this weekend, and very little time to do it with most of our members being out of town, busy, and away from internet.

Things are looking bright though. We haven't hit any major speed bumps yet.

Everything will be perfect and nothing can go wrong.

Autobots, roll out.

Week 7 Update

After a hard week of getting the Alpha build ready for playtesting, we were able to have it meticulously torn apart and criticized over problems that were fixed the very next day. Still, we did get a lot of useful feedback, some of which we already knew and some of which are good ideas for testing. We have clear goals for next week and already have accomplished fixing some of the big problems in our Alpha. Now it's just forcing teammates to keep their deadlines (and forcing them to set them up). Today we will be meeting so I can show everyone on the team how the code interacts with the game and teach them how to make changes if they wanna test things. Hopefully we'll have more time for work this week.

Alpha Video

Link to video of the Alpha build of Neato Veto. Unfortunately, there's no audio:
Neato Veto - Alpha ver.

Week 6 Update

Thus, after settling on a vaporwave aesthetic and setting our individual courses of action, our heroes busted their asses like Hell over getting the alpha ready for next week and juggling midterms.

The good news is that this week, every member knows exactly what they need to get done for next week. The bad news is that it's a lot. We of course have our priorities in terms of what is essential and what can be left out if time doesn't permit, but have a lot we want to implement for getting user feedback. Below is our current schedule at the time of this post:

This schedule will be altered as time goes on, but the main things we need to get done for next week are in there (though more will probably be added or changed in the coming days).

And with that I need to get back to studying and completing midterms so I can actually work on our game.