Awkward Dinner Party - an amazing first playtest!

Oh my goodness, What a night! As a first playtest, I was worried that we would go over the 2 hour estimated time because I was still figuring out how to be a game host, but by the end things went so smoothly, I was able to jump in on the last round as a player myself, which was awesome. (we did still go about 30 minutes over time, though!) (ᵕ,•ᴗ•)

For those who were not able to participate in today's playtest, here's the big overview:

• ⚠️I struggled with sending players their "secret" characters using DMs, as discord thought I was spamming and immediately restricted my messaging capabilities. But using the honor system, I created a supplementary chat room where someone would look to see what their character was, and nobody cheated, which was awesome! Using this method, I was able to get everyone their characters within about 5 minutes.

• 🗣️We started by trying to play the game in voice chat. While this play style had some benefits, some players kept having mic/hearing issues, and felt confused about when to speak/ask questions, so we tried switching it to text communication in round 2, which worked much better overall. I will be sticking with text conversations for future play-throughs

• 👥a few days ago, I added in a "friend" mechanic to the game, as in you could ask questions about a character's neighboring portrait (their friends), and people utilized it right away, which I think was positive! (a lot of times, last minute changes always backfire on me)

• 🖼️I think the game is balanced pretty well. I was worried that the character portraits were still too generic and it would be difficult to ask good questions to find your crush, but the "friend" mechanic ended up being used to help people hone in better.

• 🫖I whipped out a secret gag character sheet in the final round that nobody has seen yet, and it ended up being everyone's favorite! If you're playing on Thursday or Saturday, let me know what you think~

• 🗒️In the exit surveys, most people said the rules were easy to learn and not super confusing, which was a big worry of mine.

• 🥳Finally, people said they had fun. This is of course, the most important thing. It was a game they liked and wanted to play again, so I believe the efforts this month have lead to a strong title!

In Thursdays playtest, we're going to be trying out a couple things:

• I'm going to try and integrate a little ambient music, since its now possible to be in a discord "stage" room while also playing the game in text chat

• I will experiment with two different kinds of text chat to see which one folks like better

The importance of playtesting really can't be overstated -- it's something I'm going to really emphasize in the devlog of this game when it hits YouTube. In just a few rounds with a small group of people, I was able to massively smooth out the rough edges of this game. So special thanks to Salty Justice, Lala, Matt S, Fawn, Allo, CoinQueen, jhoono, Thibault, Feyre, and Meowsie Lee, my first 10 playtesters, for jumping in on this so early and giving great feedback. the game is already so much sharper because of you!

Okay, time for the sign-off joke! this one is so dumb it made me laugh extra hard...

Q: Why did the bakery refuse to serve Ladyfingers?

A: Because it was a Pastryarchy.