After wrapping up our first session of the Electronic Arcade Club, two things stick out in my mind.

The first was that having the last session before Game Day as an optional extended period. What a great idea. We saw a lot of progress that day combined with a lot of playing around. Playing around is great, and we don’t want to create a strict environment, but in a 1 hour session, it’s easy to lose a lot of time to play testing.

Second thing, was watching the amount of time each team would spend playing their own game and looking for a link to how it fared on Game Day. The winning team, Candy Inc, was giving away chocolate to players, something that really impressed me as they obviously thought about empathizing with their target audience, but definitely a lesson learned and something to mention next time as we want the games to popular for their own sake’s…I mean, who doesn’t love chocolate? The second place team spent a considerable amount of time playing their own game. This either tells us that it was in fact a well designed really fun game, or that all the play testing helped make it better, or both. Win-win.