Announcing The TGD Kiosk

TGD is currently preparing for various upcoming events, including the Tucson Comic-Con. We wanted a way to show off our games in a professional manner, manage the experience, and allow for players to provide feedback to the game developers. We’ve taken a two-pronged approach: creating some kiosk software, and also educating our game developers on how best to create a quality experience for new players in a time-limited environment.  And so I give you the alpha version of the TGD Kiosk:

Most importantly the majority of the work on this project is from the talented Andrew Seward, who took time off from crushing it in various game jams to code this for the group. Andrew developed this using Python and flask. You can see our initial mocks for the software here.

So why create kiosk software? At the Tucson Comic-Con we expect thousands of people to walk by our booth, and potentially play our games. What would be the best way to present our games, give people the option to play the games, and provide feedback? It would be possible to just have icons on the desktop, but it didn’t really give people much info about the games. Plus we wanted a system that didn’t require much babysitting. A player could play a game, optionally give feedback, and then the system would reset back for the next player. While not a major priority, we also wanted a mechanism to track playing time, and optionally quit out of the game automatically in case we were to, say, have lines of interested players (best case scenario! :D). And so we’ve created this software to help guide new players into the game. And we’re providing this software on Github for other groups to use!

And so the player selects a game from the list, plays a game, and after the game the player is taken to the ‘review’ screen in order to give feedback. We’re planning on giving away some of our stickers from our recently completed sticker drive upon review. Afterwards it goes back to the main screen, and repeat! We hope this provides a great way for our developers to get feedback from brand new players that can help them make their games better. We’re also wondering about ways for people interested in the games to give their info to developers as well.

This is our first stab at this, and we’re interested to hear from you any ideas or comments on our initiative. Got some ideas? Did we miss something obvious? Let us know!