The Beginning of The End

One thing, I purposefully held from last weeks blog was our Playtest with Göksu Uğur.

That playtest was a game changer for the team in terms of morale and direction.

Goksu was our perfect target audience. Someone interested in serious games and comfortable with VR. Her feedback was constructive while being positive.

It set a great tone for the upcoming week where we had to make some tough decisions after Softs.

Softs Feedback:

• Mom is scary, almost disturbing
• The bedroom is immersive and engaging
• The VR hands feel weird
• the car crash scene feels unfinished
• I want to paint more
• While the guest felt empathy, they didn’t feel an emotional connection

We also playtested with Jesse Schell and Dave Culyba during the week, who gave similar feedback.

After this we sat down and had a team meeting. We knew something was missing, the content for emotion was there but it was just not giving. People didn’t feel connected to Sam. They didn’t feel like Sam. Sam.

That was it. Sam was the answer. This story wasn’t about the mom or the car crash or art or other people in Sam’s life. It was about Sam’s journey with trauma and Sam was no where in the experience. While the team may have not realized this gap, our writer, Vee did. They had written a letter from Sam to their late Mom. The problem, which Charlie noted, was that a monologue from the character you are playing is almost always jarring, especially in VR.

So we put our heads together and come up with a solution. We broke the monologue into several fragments of Sam’s thoughts. Sam’s personal journey through the trauma they had gone through. While it didn’t solve our problem completely, it did help us achieve the emotional impact we needed this project to have. The guest may not feel like Sam but we’ll be darned if they didn’t feel empathy for Sam’s struggle.