Wrapping up what us did after half, it’s playtest Day! Check the demo here.

We have recevied over 30 playtesters feedback, from middle school students to elder people. This creates diversity in our playtest feedback. Some playtest takeaways we want to share here:

Experience Rating

• Overall Enjoyment: 3.7 / 5

• Naturalness of Conversation: 2.8 / 5

What Makes Players Laugh / Engage

• When technology feels clever or breakable (AI restrictions, weird questions)

• When characters feel alive (Poseidon’s reactions, myth references, AI-AI banter)

• When AI connects personally (reads names, praises users, reacts to life stories)

What Confuses Players

• Unclear player role: why they are in this world

• Opening question too open-ended; needs a guided prompt

• Mute system UI unclear — redesign input area and layout

• Dialogue too repetitive or abstract 

Art & Animation

• Poseidon age looks good; Athena appears too young (makeup, facial tone)

• Add more facial & body animations for expressiveness

• Place both in one shared scene, avoid “Zoom call” feeling
  

Some of our long-standing questions, like the repetitive dialogue issue, are still on the list. But at this point in the semester, our focus has shifted. Instead of polishing details like voice adjustments or fine-tuning responses, we’re prioritizing getting the entire experience playable from start to finish.

Having the full experience ready is more valuable right now — it helps everyone see what’s missing in terms of art assets and technical features, while conversation polish can always be handled later through prompt refinement.

This leads directly into our next step: creating a complete, detailed experience design that clearly maps out each step and goal — what Athena and Poseidon will do, what the AI Director will say, and what the audience should feel at each moment. This process will also help us determine what assets and systems we need in advance.

We also revisited our final deliverables plan, which focuses on documenting our work for future ETC teams. The goal is to make our system and design process as reusable and transferable as possible for anyone continuing this exploration.

And, to wrap up the week, here is a little bit of “fun jailbreaking”, from Tom Corbett— just experimenting with AI behavior for curiosity’s sake.