Yesterday, through a teacher friend of mine, I was invited to demo Relativity to a group of middle school students at an after school gaming club.
It was an interesting experience. Prior to this, most of the people who’ve playtested the game have been much older. To date, I’d estimate I’ve had around 200 playtesters. Out of this group, I think only 3 of them were under 18.
I didn’t really know what to expect. Going in to this particular playtest session, I wanted to test out some of the new changes I had made to the game since PAX East, to see if I’ve fixed some of the pacing issues I had observed. But I didn’t know how younger playtesters were going to react.
For the most part, the kids seemed pretty excited about the game. It was a little difficult to see how each of them were reacting to the puzzles, because as soon as one of them solved a puzzle, he would talk about how he solved it to the others. A few got frustrated early on and switched to playing Minecraft instead, but several were really into it and got pretty far into the game.
One thing that I did notice was that kids seem to use a much more intuitive approach to solving the puzzles, as opposed to older playtesters, who tend to be much more rational in their approach. This meant that the kids had a much easier time “getting” the mechanics, and found the early puzzles pretty easy.
However, for some of the later puzzles, which required a deeper understanding of the mechanics, and involved larger logical leaps, the younger playtesters struggled quite a bit. This could have been a combination of them being distracted and impatient, as by this point they had been playing for about an hour.
In older playtesters, I noticed that it often took a little longer for them to figure out exactly what’s going on with the mechanics, so the early puzzles were a little more tricky, especially the first one where they have to use cubes from two different gravity fields to accomplish one goal. However, once they understood this, they were able to apply their knowledge and logic their way through the more advanced areas.
At this point, I’m not too sure how this would affect the design of the game. I’m not really making this game with any specific demographic in mind, except maybe people like me who are interested in mind-bending stuff.
I did always picture someone a little older, at least college-aged, to be my intended audience. And for the most part, these are the people I’ve been getting feedback from. However, it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing to make the game as accessible to as many people as possible.