SIPBLOG: The toughest critics – 6/17/22

Heyhey! My name is Evelyn Tan and I’m a rising senior in Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. I am currently working with Team Samosa as Lead Artist for a time management reverse cat cafe game.

This week, we were visited by a wee hoard of 5th graders who helped us playtest our games. Even though our builds are still very rough, it was so rewarding to see them responding to the game and getting invested in the gameplay loop. The kids were super responsive, and offered tons of feedback both verbally and also through their gameplays–watching them play allowed us to identify areas of ambiguity within the loop, and also plenty of opportunities to add ‘the juice’ to the art. (If any of y’all are reading this, thank you so much! <3)  I know I’m making myself seem old here, but it was also so great to see them experience a taste of the childhood joys of our main comp–the flash game known as Penguin Diner.

SIP so far has been an incredibly unique experience–I’ve had group projects at RISD but have never developed a project of this scale. Communication has been an integral part to the group process, but creating and completing plans on the Kanban as a group has been very satisfying. On the arts side, I’ve learned a lot about the unification of style and the importance of establishing brush settings and color palettes. Though there are certainly challenges in the development process, it has so far been a lot of fun. It’s also so wonderful to be able to walk around the Innovation studio and see these games come into fruition–I’ve found many times that aesthetic issues within our game were resolved very quickly with the insights from other teams, and it’s always great when teams do the same and we can get a little sneak peak of what they are up to.

I’m so excited to see how all of these games progress and evolve, and can’t wait to download and play them at the end! In the meantime, we will be returning to the drawing board. Thank you so much WPI for hosting us and also a big thank you to the SIP team and team Samosa for being such great teammates <33

(^I promise they will be reassembled later)