Overview
This week we had Playtest Day at the ETC as well as playtesting at Hunt Library on Tuesday. We also sent out a build to all ETC faculty to get their thoughts on the game and to also give them a better understanding of what we are building. We also made some adjustments to the camera gameplay. There has also been continued work on the art of the game with essential textures, character rigs, and final character meshes done. We have also created a prioritized UI asset list and continued work on the sound.
Playtesting
Playtest Day was on Saturday the 29th, we had 7 people come through to test. In the morning we broke up the game into 3 different builds to test individual gameplay segments. This proved useful as we were able to have in-depth conversations with the playtesters after each segment, however, we felt we had the time to test the full experience. So in the afternoon, we allowed players to play through the whole experience. Then on Tuesday at Hunt library we had 2 playtesters test the full experience.
Some key takeaways:
- Players were able to make it through the game either without us or with minor intervention
- Players had some confusion in navigating the environment, some paths closed earlier in the game were thought to still be closed later. This led to them not interacting with the doors on the rooftop needed to progress in the last playable chapter of the game
- There were some players not reading or saying there was too much reading in the opening of the game
- The puzzles might have been too easy
To remedy these issues we are going to be adjusting some elements of the environment such as door textures to delineate what doors you can go through as well as add UI that marks where the player should go to progress. In the coming week, we hope to have another pass of the script and meetings with Dave Cuylba and Brenda Bakker Harger to see how we can break up the dialogue at the beginning of the game and bring out the personality of the characters more in the writing. There will also be some redesign of the specific puzzles as well.
These changes at the beginning of the game concerning the dialogue we hope will help our demographic identify with the message of the game more and hopefully help us reach our player experience goals of providing climate optimism in players. In playtesting we found a couple of playtesters did not understand what our game was trying to accomplish and thought it was just supposed to be a pleasant learning experience. While this is not a particularly bad outcome we hope to have more of an impact on players’ desire to do more when it comes to climate change and not feel powerless to make an impact.
Take a look at a few images from ETC Playtest Day:
Faculty Build
This week we also sent out a build for faculty to play the game. For us, it was a great way for the faculty to understand our experience better. It was also another opportunity to collect feedback which had some similarities to playtest day.
- Text for dialogue could be hard to read. For this, we settled on the font Verdana which is a readable sans-serif font.
- They also had some struggles with what doors they should use to progress.
- During the interstitial scenes between playable chapters, the screen is currently just black. While we have plans for 2D images in these sections, the faculty felt their absence in this build
- They felt that the photo-taking mechanic was a little odd in the way it snaps to an object
Camera Gameplay Changes
This week Faris made some changes to the camera mechanic. While not in a build quite yet these changes will remove the spots on the ground for taking pictures. Instead, there will be an icon above the objects you are meant to take a picture of. As you approach the object there is an invisible radius that triggers the ability to take a photo. You can then take a photo from any angle within the radius, though there will be a soft focus on the object to make sure you are looking at the correct object when taking a picture. More on this next week.
Meetings
This week’s meetings were with our faculty advisors and Jessica Hammer.
With our faculty advisors, we finally got the chance to talk about our scoping decisions as well as the feedback from playtest day. They made the suggestion to talk to a couple of other faculty members to guide some future design decisions.
We had sent the faculty build to Jessica Hammer and the main focus of the meeting was the UX of the game. She gave us a few things to consider.
- Chapter 4’s environment feels a little bit tight, would like more walking room
- She feels our problems with people absorbing information at the beginning of the game are because of the amount of text up front. Need to find a balance between seeing things and reading, essentially we need to find a way to break up the dialogue more for chapters 1 and 2
- She also mentioned moving some of the exposition in the chapter 3 interstitial into chapter 4 when you are having conversions with the actual characters
Some of these adjustments are already being made.
Looking Into Next Week
- Potential playtesting at Hunt Library
- Begin work on the UI
- Have all essential sound integrated
- Final Story Adjustments
- Meetings with Dave Cuylba and Brenda Harger
- Testing animations in Unity
- Making some final design decisions