Gamebook Feedback from Children
Twelve children kindly agreed to help test Smelly Trolls - The Gamebook. Thanks to all the children who took part. Here are some examples of your feedback and my responses to your suggestions.
One girl, called Emily, commented: 'Some of the sentences were a bit long/wordy.'
Feedback from Emily
So I wrote a computer program that broke the book into sentences and then arranged them in order of length. This helped me to determine any that were unnecessarily wordy.
The longest sentence was:
'The sunset colours give the surroundings a crisp glow, reminding you of yesterday evening when you were sitting around a camp fire making up ghost stories, instead of pretending to be a ghost.'
I decided to split the sentence into two:
'The sunset colours give the surroundings a crisp glow. It reminds you of yesterday evening when you were sitting around a camp fire making up ghost stories, instead of pretending to be a ghost.'
Another sentence read:
'Your heart stops. You were going to run away, but now that you know an entire box of children (whatever that might be) is under attack, you feel obligated to stay and find out what that plan is.'
I realised that 'fell obligated' was a very grown up expression and decided to make it more child-friendly. I replaced the final section with:
'you feel you must stay and find out what that plan is.'
I did the same with half-a-dozen other wordy sentences.
Molly, aged 12, commented that she would change the font/colour of the chapter subtitles in the eBook version, as she found them a bit confusing. Because a lot of people read the books on black and white Kindles with fixed fonts, it is not possible to use colours and fonts to differentiate the subtitles, so I have made the subheadings larger, instead.
Feedback from Molly Marshall Aged 12
One girl wasn't keen on the front cover. Her mother wondered if she would have reacted more positively if there had been three children in the foreground. She makes a valuable point, as children like to see characters they can relate to, and most children (hopefully) do not see themselves reflected in ugly, smelly trolls. I talked to various people involved in the project, including the illustrator Katie Stewart, and we decided that we wouldn't change the cover based on one opinion, because we've had positive feedback from other people, and as taste varies from child to child. However, we will keep on collecting feedback.
How does the cover make you feel?
The Gamebook Cover
