Week 6: What’s Next?
Our first prototype was reasonably successful for the pipeline it proved useful and the fact that we can make Castlevania in itself is a demonstration of our strength. We can certainly make more prototypes if we want to (and we will), but for now we decide to take a break from prototyping because what is more important than whether we can make games with PAT is whether other users can make games with PAT. As of now, since we have a working package, for the next 2 weeks (and the rest of the semester, really), we are shifting our main focus to supporting our users and listening to their feedback.
‘First’ Playtest
This week we asked a first year ETC programmer to test our toolkit. If us making prototypes with PAT can be seen as internal playtesting, this would be our first actual external playtest with someone from outside the team.
The playtest went as follows: the playtester was verbally taught how to use PAT for about 10 minutes, then they were given our first demo (the rabbit on the moon). We gave them tasks of making small changes on existing movesets.
Result: Playtester quickly learned how to apply small changes to single action state, and further applied their experience on multiple action state interactions
Takeaway: Tutorials can be small tasks focusing on a single feature (e.g. Action State), gradually involves more components.
Tutorials & Interface & Documentation
This playtest reinforces the importance of usability, that it is not enough to have a toolkit that is powerful. Therefore, we are now making efforts to make PAT more user-friendly. It starts with us cleaning up the inspector, removing legacy scripts, fixing variable naming patterns.
We will also be writing the actual tutorial and documentation, of course. And they are already work-in-progress. You can find the latest version here.
Future Plan
We will finish tutorials and documentation for the first package by end of week 8. Then we release the package and tutorial to the team for our second round of prototyping. A main goal of this round is to test how good the tutorial is, and iterate our tutorials based on the result. We will ask team members who did not work on the codebase to try and make prototypes with PAT.
On week 9, we will present ourselves to BVW Round 4 teams and see if we can get one or two teams to use PAT for their Festival Round. We will also be hosting a PAT mini game jam on a weekend November or December.
