This week, it’s building and building. We recorded the dialogue, added the new models, retexture old models, and have all the pieces fit together so we’ll be able to start polishing it in the next weeks. In addition, we are planning to finish an iteration of this assembled version by next Friday, which is Soft Opening day. Our plan was to make use of this week’s Hunt Library Playtest Night to make sure our refined heartbeat is indeed effective (along with refined hospital 1 scene), and next week’s Hunt Library Playtest Night to playtest the full experience.
Playtesting at Hunt Library again
Throughout week 10, we refined the heartbeat moment itself and the first hospital scene. We also wrote the full dialogue. Therefore, we built until the end of the first hospital scene, and added the dialogue.
Because we are testing what we wanted to during Playtest Day, we decided to generally follow the same playtest procedures, but without the groups of different haptic patterns.
Again with the help of Claude AI analyzing the recurring words in describing the experience, here’s a word cloud, along with the emotional perception analysis.
Theme 1: Haptics Convey Health, Not Emotion
- Clear consensus that heartbeats indicate physical state, not feelings:
- “Haptic gave frequency… only tell you about health”
- “Context gives the emotion”
- Interpretations focus on: faster = nervous, weaker = dying, stronger = adrenaline
- Haptics = medical data, not emotional data
Theme 2: Visual/Contextual Cues Carry Emotion
- Players read feelings from visual presentation:
- “Woman was upset and knew this was happening”
- “Lady sitting beside, looks sad”
- “Man looks like sleeping”
- “Old man feels dead”
- Body language and staging communicate emotion, not haptics
It is clear that the most prominent emotions from the heart crushing moment was: Hesitance, Powerful, Distant, Amazement, and Worry.
- Hesitance: came from the narrative of taking people’s hearts.
- Powerful: the action and the satisfaction of haptic feedback.
- Distant: the still scene design and narrative disposition of being a grim reaper.
- Amazement: from the haptic feedback.
- Worry: for taking people’s hearts and worried that they might not find the correct heart.
By this point, we know that with or without haptics will not make a difference, because players will be able to make out who should die simply with visual context of an old man dying on the bed, and that would be our next challenge. By design, players should stop and analyze the heartbeats before making a decision, and they should feel the graveness of their role with the heart haptic feedback.
The narrative disposition were effective, because players were able to understand their role and their goal in each scene, feeling connected to that given, and thus feeling distant to the scene because of their role and the environment, which was part of our design so the story is not too unbearable emotionally to continue. On the other hand, it is still difficult to take away the “wow”-ness from a novel technology like haptic gloves, which gave rise to the feeling of amazement.
More design decisions
Failure states of not detecting heartbeats
Because for the moment crushing the wrong person’s heart does not have any consequences, we added failure states where the dialogue becomes different.
If the player successfully crushes the right hearts for the first Hospital scene and the car accident scene, it is full success, and when the companion sees you the final time, she will be ready to go.
If the player crushes one correct and one incorrect one, it is a partial success, and the companion will be more uncertain about what she learned from you during this journey.
If the player crushes incorrect hearts for both scenes, the companion will be more pessimistic about death.
Act 2 + Act 3 assembled
Simply, with our continued development, we have our Act 2 and Act 3 assembled with placeholder assets, so we can finally test the whole thing next week.
Next steps
Next week is Soft Opening, so we’re trying our best to get assets in and polish the experience. On the other hand, we have Playtest Night at Hunt Library On Tuesday, and 4 of our team members have Project Pitching on Wednesday. It will be a hectic week!!