This week, we just came back from the week-long fall break and are recharged and ready to move the next step forward! We outlined plans for improvements on the Truth or Lie game, and brainstormed ideas for our second fitness game.
Playtest Night @ Hunt
We conducted playtest sessions at Hunt library this Tuesday, and compiled a list of backlog items that need to be addressed for our Truth or Lie game:
- The tutorial was too fast, players wanted to pause
- Most of the players did not start discussing the prompt with the room host
- Most of the hosts did not share the prompt with other players
- Most of the the host chose the prompt by him/herself and proceed
- Half of the players took a while to realize that the heart rate is the speakers’
- More than half of the players didn’t know the vote has multiple levels
- A few players did not vote
- Half of the players had assumptions about the Liar’s amount
- All the players did not understand how the ranking system works
- The ranking system seems broken (the player who made the best guess has the lowest rank)
These observations help us better understand what issues we should prioritize to improve on our released game.
- Unclear tutorial: we adjusted some illustrations of the tutorial so the text is more prominent and eligible from a quick look, and also we planned to add more functionality to the playing of the tutorial (pause/back) so players can easily go back to view parts they don’t fully understand. We also tweaked the display duration for each frame.
- Prompt choosing: Our current display of the selected prompt on non-host players is not clear enough, and some players thought their device got stuck when it stopped at the text telling them to discuss face-to-face with the host. We planned to implement real-time prompt display on non-host devices and improve how we word the instruction for them to discuss with the host.
- Result reveal: As it currently stands, the way we tried to condense all the voting results into a single number (guessing correctly gets score while being guessed correctly loses some) isn’t really helpful to the players who want to know exactly which they get right or wrong. In the next step, we want to make this as informative as possible by showing one-by-one each player’s identity and votes towards them.
New Fitness Game
Our initial gameplay pitch during halves was perceived as confusing both internally and from faculty. We found it difficult to coherently attach exercise (burnt calories) to an external battle system, and we struggled to come up with a turn-based combat design that’s both easy to learn and strategic. After discussion, we decided to pivot our game toward group-based exercise competition: more than 2 players are grouped into 2 opposite teams and each player contributes their daily burnt calories to the team. To our knowledge, Apple’s built-in fitness app only supports 1-to-1 data sharing and simplistic competition. We believe this group-based social game design should fill a niche and motivate players to exercise more from the sense of competition and peer pressure.
For proof-of-concept, we conducted a brown-box version of the game using text messaging: our team members and our advisors were divided into two teams, and each day everyone would upload their screenshot of the built-in fitness app to the text group. By the end of the day, we would manually aggregate the data from each player and draw a chart to compare efforts from the team. We hope to get more insights that help us drive and refine the design of our new game!
To start our work on the fitness game, it’s crucial to get the burnt calorie data from the device. We researched and found a way to get the daily calories data from built-in fitness tracker without having to handle sessions ourselves. Next week we’re on track to build an early prototype to test internally.
