ready for playtest

This week, the team dedicated considerable effort to preparing for Playtest Day, a crucial milestone in refining our work. This event provides us with the invaluable opportunity to gather feedback from a diverse audience across various age groups. More importantly, it allows us to put our design assumptions to the test and validate them.

Leading up to Playtest Day, our environment artists continued their creative output, going beyond mere functional assets for the storyline. Instead, they focused on crafting elements like wood boards, saws, and vials, which enhance the storytelling experience.

In terms of character development, the doctor’s animation is nearly complete, encompassing key actions such as the walking cycle, arm cutting, and switch pulling. As for our initial rendering efforts, we’ve generated multiple scenes with varying lighting setups and edited them together to produce the first version of our rendered animation.

To understand our work better from the audience’s perspective, we created a questionnaire to gather demographic information and feedback from playtesters. Regarding the question from week 7 about making it clear that the monologue comes from the monster, we thought featuring the brain in motion during the establishing shot could help. Feedback from playtesters confirmed this idea’s effectiveness.