From the playtest we conducted on Saturday, we gathered a lot of useful feedbacks. Three important points we summarized from playtests are:
- Many players enjoy the communication part (but that depends on players’ relationship before coming into the room).
- The videos and overall content from the game is very informative to players.
- The smoothness of the game is a big problem (especially the VR rowing part).
About the last point, a serious situation we observe is that VR players often feel slightly motion-sick after playing the experience. One reason is that the boat right now is applied sideway forces from controller input, which is not natural for a boat. Also, the frame rate is low and that makes players feel dizzy. On top of that, having the player in VR rowing a boat for 10 straight minutes may just be exhausting to players.
Because of that, our top priority becomes fixing the rowboat mechanism. However, the hardware limitation and nature of VR visuals makes finding a solution not so simple.
During a conversation with one of our faculty consultants, John Dessler, we talked about the idea of completely dropping the boat rowing. Instead, players are given several different fixed routes where they can decide which path to take in game. This way, we remove the “clunky” row-your-own-boat factor. Instead, players will feel like they are on a boat tour and enjoy more of their time on story and communication. That is a big change to our fundamental system, but also a necessary one given the time we have. (Video below is a demo using fixed path)
With the change to our core VR system, it requires many other changes. For example, the VR player will need a different tutorial, and the communication changes dramatically meaning that we need a more informative map system, etc. Since we want to playtest our new system, we have to develop the new system and implement a lot of other changes all within one week.
Finally, we have changed our opening scene. When player clicks start game, they will be prompted to an audio explaining the tasks they are given. Then they will choose which of them want to be the VR player or immersive room player.
