This week was Thanksgiving week, and we only have 2 work days, Monday and Tuesday. Time is running fast, but we’re determined to get more iterations on our final experience.
We planned for a Tuesday playtest, and executed it!
This time, many new naive guests signed up. In particular, there were more narrative-focused creators from ETC who tried our experience for the first time.
Feedback given on narrative
Samantha, a second year student who has been in a screenwriting and film career, gave some feedback on narrative.
Here’s what she said: “The reason why agency low is because, the three scenes in sequential order is very mechanical. Just like delivering an Uber Eats order: you know nothing of your clients, but you’re doing the requests.”
She suggested three main refinements to tie everything together more:
- Think of CROW for the characters and develop them in the story.
- Use indirect control instead of explicit instructions during tutorial. Using rhetoric questions as “hooks” and making players “guess” will give the illusion of choice.
- Three potential situations which adds nuance to the end result of “crush”:
- Want to crush it and can crush
- Want to crush and cannot crush it.
- Don’t want to crush it but heart still dies.
Our decision
We totally agreed with what Samantha suggested, and similar feedback has been coming up ever since our experience had been made. However, because the scope of our project is more on the technical exploration instead than the experience design, we decided that having suggestions of our experience design means our technical part is good enough.
Without making the game longer, there isn’t really a way to tie everything together and make the story more nuanced. However, since we only have 1 week left (and one of our programmers is off on a conference), we decided to leave this out for now, and focus simply on making our consequences of interactions more obvious.