We returned from Fall Break this week with a clear and important deadline ahead of us: Playtest Day, which was scheduled for Saturday, October 29. Our goal for the week was to implement new content for the experience that incorporated our feedback from halves, and then use playtest day to test how those changes and new concepts were being received.
To do this, our first order of business on Monday was to re-review our halves feedback and make firm decisions about how to incorporate it moving forward. One of our biggest things to address was that our current art style was too realistic, and did not evoke a “dreamlike” aesthetic for most players. Beyond that, our environment was very static, which was undermining the ambiguous, shifting, and surreal aspects of dreams that we were hoping to convey.
We had begun looking at possible inspirations for a new art style in Week 7 (as detailed in that blog), but things really clicked into place this week when we found the game 11-11: Memories Retold and discussed its art style as a team. We loved how it used multiple techniques to create the appearance of an oil painting in motion, and we felt that we would be able to emulate a similar style with a combination of lighting, shaders, and texturing styles. We felt confident that pursuing this art style would both feel more dreamlike and remain true to the style of our concept art.
With that in mind, we began creating our experience’s second scene, which was based on a cemetery, another of the common responses from our initial survey. We created concept art showing how the cemetery would become more foreboding over the course of the experience, followed quickly by 3D models and a level layout based on those concepts. We also began experimenting with particle effects at this stage by creating a dynamic fog effect that became more oppressively thick over time. We liked it so much that we ported a version of it back over to our original scene as well! During this time we also began connecting our third environment, the lake. As we made concept art and early models, we decided to include a version of the fog effect in that scene as well. We felt that this fog contributed a lot to the dreamlike, murky aesthetic we were after, and decided to use it to visually unite our otherwise disparate environments.
By the end of the week we had finished that scene to the point that it was playable, and we had also made updates to our original scene to connect it to the new one within the game world. From there, we made an updated list of 10 playtest questions, and got ready to welcome testers on Playtest Day. We ended up getting 19 testers over the course of the day, and their feedback pointed us toward trouble spots in our experience. For instance, some testers struggled with the controls, and others never found the door from the parking lot to the cemetery, indicating that we needed to work on guiding the player through our world. Overall though our testers were intrigued by the experience, and their emotional reactions, while still mild, were stronger than those from our playtest a few weeks prior.
