Hello!
This week we focused on finalizing our prototype for Playtest Day on October 29th and iterating on our feedback from 1/2s.
Iterating
Prior to this week, we had a mostly playable experience. You were able to start the game, get into our spaceship scene and view some dialog. After that you could generally move around, but there wasn’t much gameplay to the experience. Our goal for this week is to ensure we have as finalized a build as possible (for our client meeting) by Friday. Then put on some finishing touches before the playtests on Saturday.
With this in mind, we wanted to focus on the following aspects:
- Finale 1, Finale 2, and Finale 3
- Dialogs between Player and Engineers
- New character designs
Finales
For the Finales, my responsibilities were to ensure that the puzzles were implemented and there was evolution from each Finale.
Finale 1 needed to give the user just enough time to start gaining information, but not enough time to think they were capable of beating it.
Finale 2’s goal is to allow much more exploration for the player, but still keep the “winning” part out of reach.
Finale 3 should be winnable. Not easy, but through trial and error, the player should learn what works and doesn’t. Ideally the will be able to win Finale 3 within 5 or so attempts.
Dialog
We want to make sure that the game isn’t just a puzzle game and should feel like an RPG. The player should be able to make choices and feel like they are having a different experience than other players may have because of the choices they make. These choices will be explored further through the data Phoebe will begin gathering.
Characters
Our goal with the characters is never to cause harm outside our game world or otherwise create a negative experience. We received feedback that our character designs were not especially well received by some of our external advisory groups. They gave us fair criticism of the direction we had gone and we believe their feedback was useful in trying to improve our experience. With that in mind, we are now moving forward with the characters looking like this:
We appreciate all of the assistance and feedback that has helped shaped this project, and this most recent feedback was no exception.
Playtesting Day
Since Playtesting Day is on a Saturday, this post includes updates from the whole week, not just Monday to Friday. Below, I have featured some of the videos and photos taken on Playtest Day.
Playtesting Day - Videos
Playtesting Day - Photos
We were fortunate enough to have 15 playtesters come through and give us feedback on our game. We also had a wonderful group of parents and educators join us for our first session where we were able to talk about some of the goals of the project and try to answer any questions.
Some of the people from this first group wanted to stay up to date with our progress so as we create external reports, we will make sure to include any of the interested parties in those emails as well.
If you would like to communicate with us, please use our contact link at the top right of our website to send us a message.
Moving Forward
Next week’s post will discuss more about the feedback and iteration based on Playtesting.
Thanks for reading,
James from STEMspire