Sunday, January 13, 2013

The Value of Field Testing

In my last post I said that I did not do any field testing of the game during development. This is not completely accurate. Soon after I began the project in June, 2012, my brother-in-law and his family came and visited us in Georgia. I had just come up with the idea of a "hotel on the moon" as the context for the simulation/game and was wondering if it was worth pursuing. Nick and Sophie, ages 10 and 7 respectively, seemed interested in the fact that I was working on "an app," Nick in particular. So, I told them my (half-baked) story about this and to my delight they found it very interesting, so much so that they enthusiastically began drawing some pictures for me. I included two of their pictures on a page in the Credits section where I thank Nick and Sophie for their help:




If Nick and Sophie had not found this story context interesting, you can be sure I would have scrapped the idea and come up with something else.

Side note: So far, this is the only place in the app where I have found a typo. Do you see it? (I left out the word "to.")