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Monday 17th Feb
User Testing
Vanissa informed us of our upcoming play-test next week, on Thursday the 27th. She gave a lecture to help us prepare for this, including how to understand players interactions with the game. She told us to make note of what they like and dislike, common choices, mistakes or comments and to collect this data to aid our game creation. We conducted our own “play-test” of the game Harvest 101, to understand a players mindset. We wrote our confusions and frustrations with the game, ranked them from minor, to serious to critical issues, and wrote potential solutions. Looking at out game from a players perspective will help us see things we might have missed otherwise.
Yiran finished the dialogue for the narrative events over the weekend which Anna reviewed and helped with the English writing. Joe told us he had fixed the bugs and had implemented the bio resource even though it would only be useful after a later narrative event in the vertical slice as we could figure out how to introduce it later.
To prepare for the upcoming play test we outlined that we needed the first narrative progression level in order to have a playable game to test. Joe agreed to prioritise building the dialogue scene with the reviewed script and then work on the progression mechanic, helping balance resource production. We are essentially creating a vertical slice of the vertical slice. I felt concerned I would have a lot to do before the play-test, as we would technically need a dialogue scene background, the camp background and all the resource camps. However, Anna informed me that we would probably only need two backgrounds and could work on the other elements later, so I was more confident.
This weeks tasks:
- Joe – continuation of work regarding the dialogue unity scene
- create progression requirement
- linking the dialogue scene back to the survival camp scene
- Rosie – continuation of basic assets and background
- survival camp background
- dialogue scene background
- Gabi – continuation of basic assets
- Arnold concept art
- Anna – continuation of world building and structuring playtest session
- review the remaining scenes sent by Yiran
- create Arnold character profile for Gabi
- outline playtest structure
- Yiran – review feedback on dialogue
- come to next meeting to discuss changes and edits
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Thursday 20th Feb
Accessibility in games
During this lesson we discussed accessibility requirements and limitations in gaming. We considered what accessibility features we might be able to implement into our game, what features we might already have, and what features we would have to go without. Using the accessibility guidelines we created the table below:
| Accessibility Requirement | Consideration | Possibility of Adding to Game at This Stage |
| Motor | – map controls to different controllers – allow touchscreen gameplay | Low-Mid |
| Cognitive | – avoid flickering images and flashes – allow players to progress at their own pace – simple clear language – easily readable font size | High |
| Speech | – ensure there is no speech input | High (and done) |
| Hearing | – clear subtitles – no essential information should be conveyed through sound – voiced speech/text-to-speech – volume controls (music, sound, speech) | High |
| Vision | – high contrast between text and UI – no essential information conveyed by fixed colours alone – interactive elements large and well-spaced | High |
In a real game studio these considerations would be planned around during the early weeks of development. This means it would be hard for us to implement every factor at this stage, however its not impossible for a few to be included in our game.
Anna created a gameplay structure for the playtest and we all agreed we were up to date and ready for the event.
Gameplay structure:
This structure will ensure we have a very brief taster of the core game elements; narrative and the resource management mechanics. We still don’t have a tutorial stage but hopefully gameplay and objectives will be easy for the player to understand.
End of week 4 🙂
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