Hello 300!

How are you doing? Great I bet.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks and we’d love to fill you in.

A note: We’re discussing some important design decisions over in the forum. Check it out! http://thewrittenworld.activeboard.com/t48844177/tell-us-wot-you-think-building-the-world/

First schools playtest
First up some big news. Last week saw us jumping on a train down to Kent in order to put wAlpha0.3 in front of some students and teachers. It was our intention to learn a few things:

• How does our game perform with young students?
  We were testing with a group of 10-11 year olds. It’s always been our contention that The Written World needs to be accessible to younger players. Equally it’s our belief that if things can be simplified, they ought to be. In short - if there’s anything that could be done to our game to make it easier to play with for this audience, that’s going to benefit everyone.
• Does our game help people to write structured stories?
  We’re trying to build something which is a blast to play and write with, but also supports people in writing stories with an established dramatic structure. In a classroom context, this is a teaching tool - but is it succesful?
• Does our game create value for teachers?
  We want to know if a game like the one we are making could be a useful tool for teachers to use in a classroom with their students - and if it isn’t, we want to know how to make it more so. Building classroom specific features into the game will of course always take a backseat to development of our other features, but it’s great to learn what we can do to make this project something with a more positive social footprint.

How’d it go?
Tremendously well! We took a small group of 6 kids and walked them through the process of creating a story frame, and writing the first chapter of a story. 

The students enjoyed themselves and produced work which their teacher praised as up to the highest standard of which they were capable. We met with the head of the English department at the school, as well as the Headmaster and Senior Mistress. We had some great dialogue about where our game was useful and where it could be made more so in an educational context. The response was genuine, thoughtful and positive.
It’s an absolute pleasure working with both the students and their teachers. We’re looking forward to doing more of the same.

What did we learn?
Too much to pot here. We took an immense amount of value away from watching these people use our story creation and writing screens. Two of the biggest take-aways for us relate to both our story creation screen which is seeing a full overhaul as I type (a two stage process - the first stage of which will benefit Alpha Testers) and to story-writing, which we found does not offer as clear an approach to writing in correct person and tense as it could. This is an interface issue and one we’re looking forward to sinking our teeth into when we come back for our beta pass on this screen.

Alpha testing
We’ve been conducting some wider testing with wAlpha0.3 in the last fortnight. It’s been an incredibly educational process, not to mention exciting to finally see people using our game.

We’ve learned a lot from you, and want to thank those of you who have taken the time both to play and to come back to us with comments. The more you tell us about areas where you are having problems the more we can learn - we are deeply keen to have you all chip in on design decisions! Please don’t hold back.

Changes
We’ll shortly be uploading a few changes to w.Alpha0.3

• Index Page
• New story summaries on the index page
• New alert to inform you when somebody has joined one of your stories
• Alerts not grouped together into a notification center
• Stories on the index now ranked according to freshness
• Unpublished stories now hidden from the main view
• Unjoined stories now hidden from the main view.
• Story Writing
• Chat panel added to story writing screen - writers and observers can now chat outside the flow of the story.
• Force fixes in place
• Some cosmetic changes in place
• Story Creation
• We’ve heard from you that this screen just isn’t good enough. We agree, it’s one of the oldest parts of the codebase and is in desperate need of an overhaul. We’ve begun a two phase re-write of this page. Phase one will see the entire thing simplified and streamlined, you’ll see this in wAlpha0.3 shortly. Phase two will see a more drastic overhaul of the processes involved in creating a story, including some awesome new visual and gameplay elements which connect the creation of stories to the creation of maps for the world at large.

Thanks for all of your time and patience with the testing! We’ll be in touch soon and as ever,
Loads of Love,
The Written World Team