Week 10: March 27, 2023 – April 2, 2023

Blog entry by Damian Xie

Summary of the week: This week we have the critical playtest freshman year, so we need to refine the tool enough for our testers to have a full experience, and so far, we have a lot of unrefined features. To ensure smooth testing, we split the group into two parts Felicia, Randi and Yanyan will refine our interactions and program features, and Damian, Lauren and Lori will focus on the interactive storytelling experience. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we finally finished our playtest on Saturday and got a lot of useful and valuable suggestions.

Preparation for playtest

We discussed this week’s to-do list at Monday’s meeting and organized them into a list. The main work was divided into two parts, the tools group and the narrative group, with the tools group focusing on the completion of the UI interface and the implementation of the entire program, and the narrative group focusing on designing interactive story demos and creating the required props and telling the designed stories. Here is a to-do list we have compiled：

• Story demo design documentation
• Storytelling documentation 
• Physical props 
• Playtest plan documentation 
• Playtest survey
• This Is Frog storyboard
• This Is Frog art assets

Story demo design

To better present our interactive narrative, Damian created a new narrative design for This Is Owl, including the addition of physical interactives and performance elements, combined with interactive animations to tell a fun story to kids.

Storytelling Documentation

To ensure that our storytellers tell a great story, we specifically asked them to write tutorials to give them an understanding of what good storytelling looks like.

Physical props

To ensure a rich storytelling experience for our Saturday, we created a number of Physical props to complement our interactive flow.

Playtest plan documentation 

For Playtest we have written special documents for all our testers to read, one document to introduce our interactive storytelling activities and one document to introduce our tools and instructions. Children under 12 will experience our interactive storytelling content, and teens over 14 will test our story create tools.

Below is the link of our playtest plan documentation:

2023/04/01 – ETC Playtesting Day Plan – Google Docs

Playtest survey

We created a questionnaire for Playtest to get the information we needed. Below is the link:

StoryStudio Engine Survey – Google Forms

Storyboard and Art assets

To test our tool, we prepared art assets of our chosen story and a storyboard about it to help our testers be able to produce the content we needed in a directed manner.

Playtest Day

Finally, with all our preparations, we had our Playtest Day, and we were able to host all the test groups and get a lot of valid feedback and suggestions!

Overall we successfully completed this week’s playtest day and our project has reached a relatively complete and important stage, we all worked a lot of overtime and stayed up a lot of nights; but the final result is pleasing! Hooray for everyone!