Week 4: User Research + Accessability

MONDAY:

What is Games User Research?

• Academic area to understand what motivates players, how their actions can be explained or predicted, or find new ways to capture and use data about players to help games design.
• It merges different fields: psychology, human factors, and ergonomics, UX, interaction design, etc

Expert Review
-To understand small issues in the prototype stage
Survey
-To assess the attitde and perceptions users have on a wide variety of topics
Interviews
-To understand player’s perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitude about a game or experience (WHY)

Analyse the data, report the severity of the problems, and report the delierable.

Heuristics = rule of thumb.

Harvest 101
Visibility of system status:
Organised, aesthetics fit into the world, doesn’t take up too much of the screen. Some parts are a bit hard to read and the text sizes are inconsistant and hard to read.
– Solution: resize the text and some UI features to be bigger.
User Control and Freedom:
Not much control or freedom initially as the game wants to walk you through a tutorial. A lot of text to wade through that is very boring; player needs to discover for themselves more.
Incomprehensible
Many of the cards are initially useless or have zero clarification given or just boring, where you get stuck in a cycle for a while. Eg; stone and wood are useless but you can still draw them as cards Some of the events didn’t seem to have results (eg; sell 2 bread for coin and didnt recieve coin). So the process of using cards in the tutorial are boring where only at the end of the week do you get any interesting cards.
Difficult
Too much going on; too many things to collect and keep track of without being given clarification. Needs to be simplified to make the game feel more understandable, and the cards that are given need to be more interesting and less cyclical.

Seperate in 3 categories, write down the issues and priorities with sticky notes
– Critical: if we do not fix this, players cannot complete the scenario
– Serious: many users will be frustrated if we do not fix this; they may give up
– Minor: users are annoyed, but this does not keep them from completing the scenario. This should be revisited later.

Research Objective:

• Write down objective
• What do you want to test
  • Sense of exploration. Sense of scale and do you feel excited by exploration
• How will you do this

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THURSDAY:

Game accessibility the practice of making a game as understandable, comprehensible, and available to as broad a range as possible. Disabled people still deserve to play games, be it to make themselves more independant or to escape.

Basic, intermediate, and complex scaling system for all kinds of motor, cognative, vision, hearing, speech, and general disabilities. Adds accessibility to games.

Haptics is the touch sensitive feedback you get from something.

Oh, Rats! Accessibiliy Features:

• Control sensitivity/remapping
• Tutorial
• Subtitles
• Change sprint button

User testing: testing general gameplay analysis

Bug reporting: finding what breaks the game to fix it

• Summary Line
• Background details (what version of software was the bug on)
• Steps to reproduce (how often is it reproducable, what the trigger is)
• Actual vs expected results
• Other relevent information

QA (quality assurance): whether or not the game actually works as you expect it to

Bug Report of The Ancient Art of Stewcraft

• Summary
  • Incorrect window scaling on computer
• Background details
  • Windows 11
• Steps to reproduce
  • Open application, or adjust screen edges.
• Actual vs Expected result
  • Window will be deformed to have improper scaling. Expected result is that the man in the bottom right corner should be proportional to that bottom right corner.

• Summary
  • One of the rounded edges of the bowl can get an ingredient stuck to the top side of it
• Background details
  • Windows 11
• Steps to reproduce
  • Place an ingredient on the top of the rounded edge of the bowl and wait for it to rotate.
• Actual vs Expected result
  • When the bowl’s round edge rotates, the ingredient will be taken with it, unaffected by gravity. It should be affected by gravity and fall to the bottom

• Summary
  • Ingredients appear randomly on the screen when the bowl’s edge is clicked
• Background details
  • Windows 11
• Steps to reproduce
  • Click the dark grey edge of the bowl
• Actual vs Expected result
  • Ingredients will appear randomly on the screen anywhere. Expected result is nothing should happen?