This week we focused at playtesting Truth or Lie, and at the same time iterated through new gameplay designs for the new game, which will be currently codenamed as Otter Agent Training.
Truth or Lie Playtest:
We hosted the playtest on Saturday during the playtest event at ETC. Players had great responses and evaluations for our games. For the players who had played the prototype versions, they told us that they were excited and surprised by the polished quality of the game. Thanks to our effort during this week, we have added the background music as well as the voiceover for the rulebook – the game feels much more complete adding these elements, and we were satisfied with the result that most players will be able to set up the games without any instructions from us.
While most of the results aligned with our anticipations, we did observe some dynamics that aroused some thoughts about UI/UX designs. For example, the time distribution for telling the story, asking/answering questions seemed to be a little unbalanced. Some players argued that we need to add a skip button for answering the questions, as 120 seconds feel way too long under some circumstances.
Otter Agent Training Gameplay:
For the new game, we felt that the philosophy of the territory-occupying gameplay framework makes sense, so we moved forward with this thought. To test how to set the game values, Shih-Hung implemented a prototype graphic interface where we would be able to interactively play. This prototype helped a lot in making decisions about how to give players moves, i.e. a minimum executable unit they would be able to take on the board.
Specifically, the rules are developed into the following framework,
- Each player will set up a daily goal (say, 320 cal per day).
- Each player will burn calories by moving; their wearable devices will report the data to the fitness app on iOS.
- After finishing up a ring’s calories (i.e. 100% of the current day goal), the player will be offered N moves.
- After finishing up an additional ring’s calories, the player will be offered M moves, where M < N.
The challenge for gameplay falls on choosing reasonable M and N. It would be hard to test if Shih-Hung didn’t make the interface – with the interface, we found that N=4, M=1 is a reasonable value. We also started a new playtest session within 12 players, including 4 faculties and 8 students, which starts this Friday and will last 6 days.
User Interface
Once it becomes more clear about the gameplay framework, our artists would be able to generate contents for User Interface. Ivy and Iris started working on the wireframes of the interfaces, and once the interfaces were available, our team of front-end developers quickly turned them into interactable digital prototype.
Tech Team
Backend: Working on the basic gameplay logic; Implemented playtest version specific logic; Implemented playtest version APIs for frontend to use; Frontend: Working on the gadgets system; Working on the hexagonal territory map; Implemented the main interface; Implemented the gadget card VFX; Implemented the playtest version with specific APIs;