From behind my walls and gates,
I heard the telltale rumble,
of our guests, our honored guests!
And so I ran…
Saturday this week was Playtest Day! On playtest day, people from outside of the ETC come to playtest all the projects happening during the semester! It’s a great chance for teams to get try out their projects with people who don’t already know what they’re working on!
That’s especially important for us, since the big question of our project is “can people look past the duplicate renderings of objects?” We can get some of that information from ETC internal playtesting, but pretty much everyone in this building already knows the CAVERN, and how VR works. Playtest day for us was an opportunity to try out the technique with some truly fresh guests!
We saw a lot of stuff that we were already kind of expecting. The frisbee was difficult (though had a surprisingly high success rate, everyone was able to catch it after a enough tries), the flower was a satisfying moment that was easy to understand, it took people about 3 items to sort out the multiperspective view.
There was one trend we noticed, that leads us to the next main thing we are adding to our game. The speed at which a set of players understood the multiperspective view depended mostly on their experience with VR in general. It seemed like if the players were already familiar with VR, they understood things like the fact that they were allowed to walk around the space, and they had an understanding of how close their hands had to be to an object to grab it. And for players who start the game understanding that, the only thing they have to learn is how the multiperspective view works. So it takes them 1 or 2 items.
For players who had no previous VR experience, we observed that they would be unsure what the game allowed them to do, and wouldn’t as quickly treat the 3D objects as if they were actually there. Then, while still in that confused state, they would see two versions of that object, and that would multiply their confusion.
So our idea for a solution to that is essentially a “tutorial” level. A little scene before the game starts where the two players are separate, with no multiperspective view. Both of them take a photo of the market and hang it on the wall, then we move on to the main game. This way, we ensure both players at the very least know how the game wants them to walk up to, grab, and move objects, before we start throwing the duplicated rendering at them!
Next week, we’re going to continue developing the game using these observations, because our next milestone is in 2 weeks: Soft Opening!