PGF Post Mortem

Hi Guys! So if you've been reading our socials posts, you'll know we attended Perth Games Festival last Saturday. We had a great time and thank those who attended and got to try out our game.

Here's our post mortem of the event and what we hope to have learned from it. Below we'll have some photos from the event!

What went right / worked well or better than expected?

• After getting the hang of the gameplay loop, players were very quickly engaged in their tasks and knew what to do/started strategising
• The team, especially Steven displayed a very professional and friendly demeanour when running the booth
• The team was immediately noting down issues and potential fixes while observing players
• People responded well to the cute characters, especially Chamomile & Roti
• Display case created an interesting mechanic that wasn’t planned - if a player makes the order but the ghost has already left they have incentive to place it in the display case.

What went wrong / didn’t really work?

• The broom and ectoplasm harvesting from the ghosts was not explained to the players so they needed to be verbally guided on what to do
• Players were not adequately informed to stick to the order of ingredients
• Players were not adequately informed that they had put the incorrect ingredients in the cauldron until nothing came out
• Players were not adequately informed that they could use the purge lever to empty the cauldron
• The UI image of the customer’s order would stay up so if the player didn’t clock that the ghost had left they would continue trying to make that order instead of serving the next customer
• Due to the steep learning curve taking a while for players to get the hang of in level 1, then the high number of ghosts in the subsequent levels made the game take 20-30 minutes to complete, could have possibly gotten more players if they didn’t have to wait ages for their chance to play

What would you do differently next time (or if you had your time over)?

• In the case of Dom & Lily, get some sleep beforehand (◍•﹏•);;;
• Give ourselves more time to design/make/get cute decorations for the table (kudos to Steven to hand cutting the pixel outline on the standee though)
• Playtest the game with a variety of people from different gaming backgrounds to see what was/was not intuitive, as well as how long average gameplay takes to get it down to 10 minutes
• Each person should have manned the booth for a period of time rather than most of it being delegated to Steven, if not for overworking him but also to experience people’s feelings towards the game first-hand
• More questions on questionnaire to get that juicy unbiased feedback
• We would've liked to get a chance to check out more games at the expo, especially the other students games!

Here's some photos we took at the event~!

Thanks for reading! - Lily