Week 12 Friday is Soft Opening! But before that, we have Hunt Library Playtest Night on Tuesday. Our team members were individually working on project pitches for next semester as well, which was on Wednesday. We were extremely busy this week, but our goal was to finish strongly with a complete final experience ready for official opening, as well as documentation outline for all that we discovered and learned, which were both of our deliverables for this project we pitched 7 months ago.
Playtest Night
First off, Playtest Night, the second to last one this semester were our opportunity to playtest everything we want to show on Softs, or what we like to call, playtest our softs. Working through the weekend, we got the model of the companion’s physical form ready. In addition, having written the dialogue for “failure states” of each choice of heart crushing, we also recorded the additional voice lines on Monday. We also finetuned the haptic patterns so that every one of them are distinct enough within the same scene, so that a decision can be made. Finally, we got a car model that completely fit our requirements from a fellow ETC student Emily Zhang’s BVW world a year ago, and by Tuesday evening, we integrated every new asset with the experience so that it is complete in the actual timeline.
It went like this:
- Tutorial scene with 3 hearts to practice heart crushing
- 1st Hospital scene with 2 characters to feel the heart from (choosing decision should be supplied by both context and haptics, but it can work without haptics, because a person sick on the bed is already obvious enough who might be going)
- The void: players meet the companion the first time as they monologues about death
- Car accident scene with 3 characters, with 2 of them having equal opportunities of dying just from the scene.
- The void: companion responds to the “correct” and “incorrect” observations the players made from the 1st hospital scene and the car accident scene, and states that it is now their turn
- 2nd Hospital scene where there is only the companion’s physical form, a young girl, lying on the bed peacefully. Far away you can see the 1st hospital scene a curtain away (but unreachable)
We playtested with the same interview structure where we first determined their understanding of the player goals, asked them why they chose certain people to crush their hearts, and finally surveyed them on their emotions while crushing the heart.
Successes
- Huge success: haptic patterns were distinctly different.
- Most importantly, our tutorial scene was effective. Now people know how to crush after practicing it three times. In addition, they are aware that the “choices” weren’t moral, but puzzle solving by finding the faintest heartbeat.
- Even with our unposed models, players felt sad for them, and most people were emotionally connected to the context.
Failure
- Most gravely, many people were not able to access the driver in the car. Most of them did not see her because the window is blocking the view.
- Players are not emotionally connected with the companion, and the sadness came from just that she is a little girl, not because you have known her in the journey.
To address these, our refinements list went down to:
- Re-pose the characters so they are complete and with more details of their emotions.
- Make sure the driver is visible.
- Make environment sufficient and not distracting.
Emotional Wheel Analysis
Having playtesters experience our full game compared to previous when there were only 1 tutorial and 1 hospital scene, even though the number of playtesters were drastically different, the playtester’s VR experience were actually similarly distributed normally.
We can see that, even with the changes of the heartbeat separated from crushing in the 11/1 Playtest Day and 11/11 Playtest Night playtest, and that the playtester numbers were very different, the emotional wheel frequency were quite similar, where hesitance and powerful leads the emotional experience. On the other hand, after creating the full experience, even with the huge difference in playtest participant numbers (and as any survey, discounting individual differences that we cannot account for for now), with the narrative added in, it immediately spiked up the broader category of afraid and helplessness, as well as took away the happy category. Of course, this hypothesis of narrative really giving a different emotional experience still has to be reevaluated with more different playtest groups, but at least for now, our team was happy with this difference.
Some discussions for project directions in the week
One of the faculty at ETC, Mike Christel, gave us valuable suggestions on making progress for more playtesting data that could bloom into interesting research spaces we can use to submit into an HCI paper in the future.
Specifically, he recommended us to have in-game metrics that we can add to the heart moment, so that we might be able to track if hesitance as an emotion can be tracked with quantitative data.
Our team was excited but cautious about this idea, as quite some of us are indeed interested in turning our project into a short paper, but were not sure if with Meta SDK constantly confusing player’s interactions if we are able to actually get good data.
In the end, after consulting with more faculty, after learning that our data would not be useful if we haven’t taken the IRB and have all our playtesters sign a consent form, we decided to put down the thought of putting in this data collection step, and focus on experience design.
Iterations for Experience Design + Documentation
Adding poses and environment design stuff.
Car is now seen. Smoke. Tree. Lighting.
Soft Opening
Friday Soft Opening finally happened. Our team prepared an intro to our design insights through our documentation outline, and follow with a try-out of the full experience that we iterated even more after Tuesday.