Playtest Day has come and gone. This dev report is technically dated a weekend after it should be, but Playtest Day was over the weekend. No sense in reporting once again before that event!
Leading up to Playtest Day was comprised of a lot of work on much of what I described in last week’s log. The character creation system was mostly in, so we did also shift to looking more at what the in-game city-world that your characters would live in would look like. At this point, it’s largely still just a greybox, so it isn’t altogether too exciting. But here’s a look, in case you’re curious:
So, Playtest Day! We were running our testing groups at the Space Bridge itself, which is of course great. But the construction of the day itself is a bit of an odd one for us. Our target context is, of course, Festival, which is an event that expects quite large crowds. The groups of 2-5 people at Playtest Day weren’t the best approximation of that. But regardless of that, this was still the first time we had outside players actually interacting with systems and UI, so perhaps seeing that all occur in a more restrained, if less accurate, environment was better for our observations.
Unfortunately, I am embarrassed to admit, we did not take any photos of people at the consoles themselves. However, I do have some photos from the backrooms about midway through our playtests:
The main things that we were looking for in observing and interviewing are playtesters were: what elements of the UI did they find confusing if any and what did they want/expect their character to do based on how they designed it. To the first question, we found that players in the younger age demographic (26 and younger, including some middle schoolers) really didn’t need any guidance in understanding how the character creator worked and how they could use it to create a character. Older players did need a range of guidance, depending on their apparent familiarity with video games. We also found that our icon for the eyebrow body part in the character customizer was confusing, so we will be adjusting that!
To the second question, we got quite a fun range of answers. Lots of people wanted to their character to be, in some way, helpful to the community of characters they saw on screen when they started making their own character (unprompted by us, especially given that our given world was so empty, which I view as a promising sign). And then also, a significant portion of players wanted to make a character that was evil, or in some way mischievous, largely due to some of the character customization options (mainly the eyes, eyebrows, and mouths) guiding them to think of their character as some kind of troublemaker.
We also had one player that wanted to have their character turn the entire city into a Walmart, and one player who wanted their character to start a cult.
Overall, people enjoyed making their characters! I mean, there is some implicit bias towards that result in that these playtesters aren’t liable to just say “I hated doing this” (unless they really hated it). We did try and avoid that bias by not just asking them in our list of questions “did you like making a character”, but rather by focusing on asking them about what they were trying to design for when they were making a character. And the most common motivations that we received were “I wanted to make a character that was cute” and “I wanted to make myself”, which are the two motivations that we want to see! So, a good sign.
But there was, of course, the sense from players that the world was empty. That manifested largely in an expression of wishing that they could see their character do more than just wander around. That too, however, I think is a good thing, seeing as that is an expectation we aim to meet in the coming weeks. So, in all I would sum the results of our playtesting on Playtest Day as “Our playtesters understood the basic premise of their world, enjoyed creating a character, and desired to see the experience move roughly in the direction we have planned (also there are some things in the UI we need to adjust for clarity)”.
So, we’ll try and do just that. As our next shorter-term-goal-than-Festival, we are going to run an inhouse playtest on the Space Bridge at the ETC the Wedneday of November 12th, a week and a half away. So… a repeat of last week! A lot of development to do until then, then we’ll test it, and iterate again. All part of the process. Until then!
Over and out,
The Intergalactic Buttoneers