17/02/2025
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During our Monday lesson we covered GUR (Games User Research) this was to start getting us prepared for our mandatory play testing next week!
So what is GUR you may wonder and here is what it got broken down to:
- An 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 game design.
- It merges different fields: psychology, human factors and ergonomics,
UX, interaction design, etc.
We also did a little exercise of evaluating what types of research methods there were & what we could use when conducting our own user research.
What is the purpose of usability expert analysis?
- It helps to identify specific aspects of the game that could contribute to issues with players understanding and usability.
- Expert review is a process for structured evaluation seeking flaws, strengths and opportunities in design.
- Do players understand the game rules and core mechanics? Do teaching scenarios work effectively?
- Are the game controls and UI supportive and easy to use? Can players utilise the core mechanics?
- Is the experience emotive as intended? Is the pace, balance and challenge in line with the design intent?
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Group activity – analysis ‘Harvest101’
When playing this game we had to think of 3 issues and 2 best practices. Some of mine were one being that the UI on phone was very small and most of the time the text wasn’t coherent as sometimes it would be perfect sizing and the next it would be really small. It also became very repetitive and I ended up just deleting the game. However, all that being said the mechanics were easy to understand and get to grasp with but there was also a little bit too much going on as there was also a shopping section to buy more cards with the currency being blueberries which unless I skipped over it by accident it didn’t make sense for the currency to be blueberries as there was also coins so that felt me feeling a bit confused.
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Play Testing Discussion
We had a little break and then once we were back we moved onto what we were going to be producing for our week 5 mandatory play testing session
We decided to go for a small slice of our café scene as it would good to get feed back on some of the mechanic, art cohesion and maybe apart of the narrative. In the second image is a suggestion from Vanissa who said we could have two versions in terms of the art style to see what players preferred.
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20/02/2025
During week 4 we covered accessibility within games as well as how to write bug reports to help us when it comes to next week and having people play test our mini versions of our games.
Here was a list that myself and the group came up with in terms of what we could implement into our game to make it user friendly. Sophie also agreed that these were a good start into implementing accessibility. I sent a screenshot over onto Discord which Jessie replied saying she could make a start with some of these over the weekend.
Later on within the lesson we moved onto bug testing old game jams from WSA and then writing our own bug reports to help us understand how to write one for when it comes to our playtesting next week. I suggested to the team to potentially make a google form version of a bug report so that once players have play tested they can write us up a bug report to help then Jessie when it comes to the coding side of things.
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Here were my weekly tasks for this week, some I’ve been able to check off already and others I will either finish over the weekend or carry on into next week.
