After the fall break, we started the second half of the project. We had the playtest day of this semester on October 29th. Over the course of a full day of playtesting, we received 21 survey responses. The participants were all adults, and nearly half of them have technical or art knowledge background and experience, which exceeded our expectations. The testing process started with guests being invited to watch an overview video, and then they experienced our real-time demo, navigating the procedurally generated Tang Dynasty cityscape from either a first-person or third-person perspective. If the guests have some technical development background, we will also invite them to try out our specific tools, or go into detail level introductions or communication. The results of the playtest survey will be recorded in detail below.
Nearly 85% of the respondents play video games at least once a month, and nearly one in five play video games every single day. Having a high percentage of game players has positive implications for our playtesting.
Puzzlers and party games are the most popular. There are also a lot of people who like playing open world games, shooters and sports simulators. We were pleased to see that the second highest percentage of respondents chose open world games, which is highly relevant to our project research and makes the testing results valuable.
Nearly 80% of the playtesters have some programming or art experience, and 38% have both. That is really good.
About a quarter of the guests have used Unreal Engine to some degree, but most still have never touched it. One interesting fact, however, is that relatively more guests know or have used Unity. So when we told them Unreal is a game engine like Unity, they had an interesting “aha!” reaction.
Not so lucky for Houdini, where only one guest said he was a beginner of it and all the rest have never heard of this software. However, this is actually what we predicted.
As some of the guests are Chinese, nearly half of them have varying degrees of knowledge about the historical architecture of Tang Dynasty. And nearly 15% of the guests have above-average knowledge of it. In this way, we believe that everyone can be more comfortable in the aesthetic evaluation of the generated cityscape.
For the next 3 questions, in the evaluation of the aesthetics, authenticity, and desire to explore, everyone was so polite and so kind, and gave really high marks. Even though we made a conscious effort not to look at their screen or surround our guests as they were filling out the survey. We are really pleased that so many of our guests gave us a perfect 10, but we are also a little concerned that a high score is a kind of encouraging and does not objectively and truly reflect what people think of our development so far.
The proportion of the guests who wanted to see more various kinds of buildings, more water systems and more humans and animals in the scene is the highest. People are really looking forward to seeing a world with life and stories, and that is also reflected in their other comments. At the same time, they wanted the world to be real, so some supernatural elements like goblins and cyberpunk did not seem to go over well.
Most guests are significantly more open to the classic first-person and third-person perspective controllers. Fewer people would consider alternative controls such as flight mode and vehicle mode. Obviously, our future development will focus on the former.
For the guests with some technical development background, they also helped us test the usability and accessibility of the specific tools.
In the end, our guests left a lot of really nice, warm and helpful comments and messages. We really appreciate it!
