This week was all about collecting a final round of feedback on our feature-complete experience, so that we could tweak it to make it as strong as possible before festival and final presentations. We started off the week Monday morning with a playthrough by our faculty instructor, Ricardo. During his playthrough, Ricardo felt that our mechanics finally worked and made sense, and that our environments were now legitimately creepy in the way we intended. However, he felt we still needed to tutorialize our mechanics better for new users, and he also wished that our frame narrative of a fictional sleep study was a little stronger. We worked to incorporate his feedback in the first half of the week.
Later in the week, on Wednesday, was our Soft Opening. During this time our faculty consultant, Ralph, played our full experience for a final graded evaluation. Ralph ended up playing the experience twice, and he had a lot of positive things to say about his playthroughs! In particular he thought our final art style really evoked a dream, when it really hadn’t the last time he saw it around halves. He also liked the ending moment, but encouraged us to take it further, and to emphasize it with more sound effects. Overall, he was impressed with how far we had come since halves, and we felt confident in incorporating his feedback in time for the festival.
We also scheduled playtests with a final round of naïve testers to test the effectiveness of our final experience, which took place later Wednesday afternoon. Even though we had fewer testers than in previous tests, they still ended up providing a really valuable cross-section of experiences with our game. Some testers were very engaged with the experience and taught us which parts of our experience were working correctly an having the intended effects. In general, the entirety of our experience now worked as intended for most testers, provoking the intended emotional reactions at the intended times, albeit at varying levels of intensity. For one tester in particular, who had no foreknowledge of our experience, seemingly every moment we had planned landed perfectly and got a very strong emotional reaction! However, there were also some testers who became lost or disinterested, and they pointed us toward the parts of our experience that we still had time to fix or clarify. This included technical issues such as getting stuck on environment geometry or being physically unable to reach certain reality checks, but also art issues such as the door to the next level not standing out enough from the surrounding environment.
Finally, we began making plans for our final presentation, and for presenting our experience at the festival next Friday. We decided to focus the first half of our presentation on explaining the finished experience and its art style, and then spend the remaining time sharing lessons we had learned throughout the semester from our iteration. More specifics on both of those will come next week as we prepare to finish out the semester!