Summary
We spend most of the week preparing for the major update of our game: Build v2. It has a big update on the UI graphics, some new levels including a binary-exploitation level, and sound effects for the first time.
Then we playtested this version of the game on ETC playtest day with a group of middle school students, high school students, and adults. Different groups have different feelings about the game but we are glad to see that the main target audience: high school students are giving positive feedback.
Development: A Major Build Update:
Update List:
- Remake of old levels: some old levels have new sprites and cleaner visual style
- Newly added level: a binary exploitation level that has a brand new game mechanism and multiple tutorial levels for the player to understand the basic gameplay
- Sound/Implementation: we added sound effects when players were dragging cards and for other interactions
- Renovated UI system: the UI visuals were redesigned with richer and more in-themed graphics
- Animations and new sprites
Playtest Day:
Preparation
We went to a playtest workshop on Monday to learn about how to conduct playtest in a professional way.
Then for the playtest, we made pre-play and post-play surveys to measure how playtesters felt about the topic before and after playing our game. We also designed and printed out a paper version of game tutorials for the playtester.
We also standardized our interview questions for the playtesters so that our game designer can collect data in a more scientific way.
Feedback
On the playtest day, we have run 15 playtesting sessions with 9 middle school students, 3 adults and 3 high school students. They received the game differently.
But we were glad to see that our major target audience – high school students loved the game and could understand the concept behind it and definitely would love to try more difficulty levels.
Since the playtest day was on Saturday, we would analyze the data
Other
We also had a meeting with Jesse Schell this week.
Jesse Scheel feedback: Some of the interactions were not clear and confusing. Also, he mentioned another game that Schell Games made for us to reference.
This game called Ink Blott Underground features finding pieces of words and gluing them together to solve puzzles.
Next Steps
Our plans for next will be:
- Summarize playtest day feedback
- Story
- Inter-puzzles between major game mechanisms
- Another level of implementation of reverse engineering
- Character Design
- VFX Polishment