Winter Came as Expected

The playtest went expectedly well. We knew what to expect from our build and where it stood narratively, emotionally and experientially.

What we learnt from the playtest:

• People closer to our own demographic responded well to the experience
• You needed a certain amount of familiarity with video games to be able to get the best sort of experience
• The story/narrative was clear and people weren’t too confused by the basic plot despite the non linear nature of the experience.
• The people knew they were playing as Sam but they didn’t “feel” enough as Sam
• Even though we only had four fragments, some of our playtesters were able to empathize with Sam and their situation.
• People were immersed enough to respond to the Audio barks
• People really liked painting more and wanted to paint more

The one big missing piece from our build for playtesting day was the Car Accident Scene. We have always known that this was going to be a technical feat to achieve and it was. We prepared our selves to soft release the first draft of this scene for Softs. Our first chance to show our product to our faculty.

During this week we also playtested with Chris, our faculty advisor. His feedback was very different from what we had received.

• Some of the user cues/indirect control cues we were trying did not work
• The options given to the user, i.e. “what to paint” felt manipulative and not cerebral. The experience was not as abstract, as we had been aiming for.
• The user felt controlled.

This was a lot of feedback to take in. But it was all good feedback because it set us on the right path, and didn’t leave us in an ambiguous space.

Taking from the playtesting results we tried to achieve the following:

• We want people to paint more things in the bedroom
• We wanted to put in the car crash scene