WEEK 6

Playtest Night at Hunt Library

We participated in this week’s weekly Playtest Night at Hunt Library and received a lot of effective feedback during the event. We have released a test version this week to test the virtual piece building part. Based on the advice of the 1/4 Walkaround and Scott’s suggestion of testing as early as possible, this is an early version of process testing aimed at verifying the fluency of our design for building virtual LEGO using tablets and whether the user experience is intuitive.

We asked the participants to share our experience with 2 instead of playing it solo, because we also want to see if the Brick-By-Brick’s gameplay was still enjoyable with tablets and virtual. Overall, most of the testers were having fun and enjoying our experience. The main feedback we received during the Playtest Night was 1. visibility and camera movements (camera control), many of the participants thought the camera movement was weird and made the experience sometimes exhausting to play; 2. brick rotation and placement (in-game control), the experience of attaching the bricks was not that smooth as expected; 3. some of the participants brought out that we can add an undo/redo system so people can have a chance to fix their bricks quicker, and some also suggested that we can add a phase that allows people to sort the bricks first.

We discussed the feedback we received after the test was finished, and we decided to focus on improving the camera movement and brick controls as the highest priority. Making the camera more intuitive, adding a rotation function to the bricks, and highlighting the brick when it is able to attach. We are not going to make an undo/redo system since we would like to make the experience closer to a real LEGO building experience, and there was no undo or redo in there. Instead, we are going to make a detach mode to simulate the action of detaching the bricks off.