After looking at the results of the first playtest, we had a couple of long meetings and discussions, leading us to two major conclusions. First, the team is not so passionate about pursuing creating the current concept of the game. It was boring and complicated. The team was confused with the approach to development. That resulted in the second problem – the message of the game remained unclear even for the development team. All the possible issues that we thought of during the pre-production stage escalated quickly. All these conclusions we  gathered from the feedback and talking with play testers after the sessions.

So we changed our message of the game from “Teach players how to avoid scams, and, overall, scams are everywhere” to “We want to teach you how to gather information through the Internet, and, especially, the fact that not all the sources can be trusted”.

At first, I was worried about our schedule as we were just 2 weeks away from the next playtest. We needed to develop a playable prototype with new assets (as we shifted from 2D to 3D environment as well). Let alone that our team mainly consists out of one programmer and that looked like a tremendous amount of work.

I took the responsibility of all the documentation so that our artists and programmer can focus on the production completely. For future this experience taught me a lot about risk management and possible factors that are needed to be tracked in order to mitigate the risks without rush.