Player Feedback From PAX South is in!

Here it is the Thursday after the show and I’m still getting caught up! I did have a chance to go through and award the SSDT-Shirt to our email winner, Robert. Congrats!

While I was at it, I started going through the player feedback. The feedback was given via a Windows form application running on a netbook, because wifi was not an option in the convention hall! Luckily, my former life in development at given me the know-how to quickly throw together a form that would save the results to disk.

it is totally a form dogg
Not flashy but it did the job!

The lure of a free t-shirt and the prospects of getting into the beta got many people to provide feedback via this form. Each time a user filled out the form, the results were saved to disk. I didn’t think too hard about the format as I figured I would have to compile the data after I got back. Here’s a sample from one of the files:

wantSteamMachine:False
want3DS:False
wantWiiU:False
wantXBoxOne:True
want360:False
wantVita:False
wantPS3:False
wantPS4:False
wantIOS:False
wantAndroid:False
wantLinux:False
wantMac:False
wantWindows:True
WinShirt:True
ballsLikeToSee:volley ball
newProSportsPlayer:tennis
favProSportsPlayer:Basketball
JoinBeta:True
email:SECRET
feedback:awesome game. more athletes would be awesome

With 200 odd files I wanted to automate the conversion of this data into a csv file. Luckly, it is quite simple in Visual Studio to loop through files, read them into a string array and split each line at the ‘:’ to get the values. So I built a simple console application to do just that, and spit out a .csv file. After reading the data, the code spit out a simple CSV file I could easily open in Excel Starter edition.

such spread sheet. wow.
All the datas

Using Excel Starter was simpler than Google docs while I was debugging my data converter because the files were local, but you could use Google for this sort of thing as well. In fact, I ended up moving it to Google docs anyways because Excel Starter Edition won’t let you freeze header rows.

an unbelievable spread sheet full of datas that you won't believe such as "0" and "1"
More hot spreadsheet action :O

Once in Google docs, I put some totals in at the bottom and some simple conditional formatting too. Fancy! Next I went through player suggestions for balls and new types of athlete for the game, bolding any and all unique ideas that sounded doable. Some of these were from my select box, but players could write in entries as well.

Let me show you them.
Let me show you my datas.

The next interesting thing was players’ favorite in-game athlete type. I had a big list and needed the counts so I could graph it. Luckily I found a handy website (http://www.somacon.com/p568.php) to do the counting for me. With this compiled data, I found another handy website (http://www.jonwinstanley.com/charts) that would throw together the code for a simple Google chart. No coding needed!

Hockey: 63, Roller Derby: 32, American Football: 28, Soccer: 28, Basketball: 19, I don't know: 20
Way to go, hockey guy!

Now all that’s left to do is go through the actual text feedback, and the player and ball metrics from the show (but that’s another post!).

feedback
this was awesome!!!!
General Movement should be faster. Would make for an INCREDIBLE game with just that addition.
Plays a lot like Ice Hockey on NES, which is great.
Favorite game at PAX
awesome concept, a little hard to control
dont know, didnt get to play womp
Very fun party game. Recommend being able to control the goalies.
great game lots of fun.
really fun party game to play with friends
 really fun picking it up. took a while to figure out character differences
Awesome game. Want to see on a console soon.
 best game N.A. please make more like this
Great Game, you Killed PAX
It's pretty fun fast paced action
love the concept. need to play more to get a better sense of it all.

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