This week (Apr.4 – Apr.10) is all about playtest. We had our official playtest day last Saturday and arranged for 17 playtesters of ages 20 to 50 to experience our world. We also scheduled a meeting with Ruth, our project consultant, to better get ready for the soft opening.
Playtest results
We gladly found that most of our playtesters rated our world over 6 and found it enjoyable to spend time in it. And more than 85% of the playtesters voted for “learned something about this topic”.
We also get some “negative” feedback. Half of all the playtesters felt lost wandering in the plaza and we noticed a lot of them had a hard time figuring out how to control the character and rotate the camera.
It was a valuable lesson for us that not all our users are game players and they might not be familiar with the basic control for a game-like experience. We will iterate on the instruction steps at the beginning and make them more specific and also rearrange the layout of the plaza to make the 3 halls pop out.
Meeting with Ruth
We scheduled a meeting with Ruth later this week and went through the experience in detail. We used the meeting to discuss extensively some UI/UX design choices and she pointed out a lot of grammar and font problems that didn’t strike our minds before.
Next Step
The playtest day is a major milestone for our project, we built a relatively complete version of our experience and received a lot of constructive feedback. Waiting ahead of us is the “painful” process of iteration. There are tons of details for us to revise and iterate on. We will use the coming week for that and get ready for the soft openings.