There was a great turnout of people from the Greythumb NL group when I announced an evening in which they could be the first people to play Tetragotchi. Click on the picture below for the big picture (note the Rotterdam Erasmus Bridge in the background!) with all the laptops playing the game. (I've heard that the original Greythumb group had disbanded, but we persist!)

Fueled by beer and pizza, we set out to kick the tires of the game, to see what first impressions people had, and what suggestions they might be able to make. I set up my own macbook as server and invited everyone to join (Tetragotchi is by invitation only). We spent a good few hours laughing and trying out the evolution and some were even busy attacking each other.

One thing that became abundantly clear is that it becomes a lot more interesting if there is enough explanation about what the rules are and how it all works, and this insight prompted me to make an improvement to the game yesterday. People need to be able to learn about things while the program is running.

I now have it set up so that at the right hand side of the game screen there is always an HTML page with explanatory text and pictures, and I can add to and update the collection of pages that appear on the server whenever I come up with new things to write. This way I can respond to people expressing confusion by adding text that hopefully clears things up for them. It also gives people something to read while they have their Tetragotchi in evolution mode.

Other than that I was very encouraged to find that it worked on all three operating systems: OSX, Windows, and Linux. Also, nothing important went wrong! I was able to fix the minor problems that we encountered.

Thanks to the folks who came out!

So now we're getting ready to go to the 14th European Skeptics Conference in Budapest, and I will be trying to put the game online before my talk there.