Stepping back a little bit, in terms of the hardest parts about play testing, it’s also just the logistical and organizational factors. That was useful sometimes because it gave people an organized way to collect their thoughts. It was a Google form, and that enabled us to just send the Google form to everyone who came to the play test, and have them fill it out.
We constructed a survey based off of some other play test survey I found somewhere.
#Medieval times food menu june 28 2018 how to#
There was this satire on one side, and then also this game loop that existed out there in a lot of other existing party games, so it was the question of, how do we use these in tandem to make something special? We wanted to design the game around fun rather than around a type of social experiment, or something you would play in a critical theory class or something.Īlex: The classic advice you’d get from a lot of people smarter than me is, “Take the feedback seriously in terms of what people are saying isn’t wrong, but discard most of their suggestions about how to improve it.” This is because while they’re responding to some part of the game that they’re not finding fun, they’re not in the weeds enough to really know what the issues are.įred: You have to think of it like you’re the doctor who understands the underlying issue, and this is really patronizing, but the play tester is somebody who’s coming to you saying, “Hey, it hurts when I do this.” So you have to be like, “Oh, would this work, or would this work?” You have to really debrief after the play test with whoever you’re working on these types of issues and be like, “Do you think when they were saying this, they really meant that?” There seemed to be an amazing space for satire and commentary within the startup world. I’ve played so many of these improv type games that have a similar hook to them, but none of them really spoke to me because there’s not something particularly contemporary about them. Alex can probably slip into the other version of it, which he went through.Īlex Hague: Taking something from idea to product is a super long process, but there’s something really great about that beginning moment, when you’re just sort of pitching someone like, “Hey, I have this idea.”įred had this idea about combining disparate ideas by merging startup companies to make something absurd and unexpected. That’s the I’ve got a friend who made a card game way of starting a game. I emailed Alex: “I have an idea I want to pitch to you.” He came over, and he had a much better take on the idea.
I thought, “I could probably make a social party game, too.” Then I thought, “Who should I talk to?”Īlex and I had met each other about a year earlier, and just hung out at XOXO, where Alex was demoing his game, Monikers. I know the Cards Against Humanity guys, and they did well with that. I thought, “That would actually be fun.” Obviously there’s a lot of demand and fun around that space right now. That process had been scurried away in my head for a decade, so when I had the rudimentary idea of a game where you’d have to improv terrible company ideas, I went from there. The game design part and the play testing came in once we had a basic concept of the rules, and that kind of thing. I’d taken a game design class in grad school, so I knew that you could just get a deck of cards and try your idea out with some friends. What do you do next?įred Benenson: Pitch Deck was my first published game. Here they break down the story of how Pitch Deck came to be. They worked with several designers over the course of developing game, including Jakob Scott (logos and card illustrators), Simon Abranowicz (web and box illustrations), and Jill Lewis (design). The game’s design is largely a product of Alex and Fred’s collaborative process for refining the rules and editing thousands of cards over the course of dozens of play tests. Over the next two years, they worked together to bring the game to life, starting with ugly prototypes and Google spreadsheets, continuing through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and finishing with a large print run.
In late 2015, when Fred had the idea for Pitch Deck, he presented it to Alex, and they evolved the idea into a game that would actually be fun to play. He met Alex Hague at XOXO in 2014 when Alex was demoing his game Monikers, and the two quickly became friends while bonding over their shared love of “smart dumb” party games, a misanthropic sense of humor, and a general distrust of technological utopianism. Fred Benenson was Kickstarter’s second employee and worked there until 2016 as their VP of Data.
0 kommentar(er)
