Design

This week, we made some changes to the gameplay. We assigned players two roles: the cheerleader and the audience. Each car team is assigned one cheerleader and multiple audience members.

The cheerleader needs to walk around the room with the Vive tracker. When the cheerleader approaches a certain group of audience members, those audience players can press the cheer button on the web interface to cheer for the car that is passing by their section, which in turn speeds up the car.

We made this change to encourage more communication and interaction between different roles and players.

Playtest

We went to South Fayette Middle School, our client, to test our design in their CAVERN space. The play testers were the students. Since it was our first time testing the game in their CAVERN, we spent some time setting up the devices and preparing our build.

We had eight players testing at a time—two players acted as cheerleaders for the red and blue teams, while the others were audience members. At first, they were confused about the cheering mechanic and discussed how to play the game. As the game progressed, the amount of conversation decreased, and the players became less energetic compared to the beginning.

We have also playtest with our consultant-Chris and Jack from Simcoach

Feedback from the Playtest

• When one group of players is playing, the others waiting could use that time to learn the game instructions.
• The web players were unsure if their actions were working or when they should perform them.
• Most of the player conversation focused on figuring out how to play, and the amount of talking decreased over time.
• The red car was sometimes hard to see.
• The cheering mechanic was confusing.
• The VFX was not clear enough as visual feedback.

Next Steps Based on Feedback

• Improve the VFX feedback for audience selection and the cheering effect on the car.
• Enhance the environment art (make the scoreboard more readable, improve the audience seats, and polish the track VFX).
• Refine the web UI to make it clearer that the cars are being influenced by the players’ cheering.
• Rework the environment layout to make it easier to read and visually enhance the energy of the car race.