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Monday 24th Feb
I was absent on this day due to being unwell, but my teammates caught me up on what happened.
My team adjusted the management gameplay to avoid repetitiveness by introducing a risk factor in the form of weekly requirements, to give the player something to work towards. This also introduced a fail state where if players didn’t achieve their goal by the end of the week they would get a fail message.
Class notes:
“Branching off from the weekly requirements we discussed NPC happiness/satisfaction and how gathering certain materials might lower or raise that aspect, this would also allow for replayability as players could restart the game to focus on a different NPC than they did last time. It was interesting but complex. We will come back to this after the playtest.
We knew that we had to stress the importance of food gathering for survival and so decided that we should implement a daily food reduction mechanic, enhancing the idea that the survivors are real people that need nourishment and are under the player’s leadership – their survival depends on you as the leader. This is what we are prioritising at the moment for the playtest.”
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Thursday 27th Feb
1st Playtest
When Thursday came we were ready for our playtest. Joe had finished updating the game, I created the bug report sheet and Anna wrote up some questions for the survey. Yiran had also made some music for the survivor camp gameplay, which we weren’t expecting to have at this stage but were very happy to receive.
We used Joe’s Macbook to playtest on, making him in charge of setting up the game for each play tester. Anna opened the Bug report sheet and a table to write notes in on her laptop, monitoring the play testers and writing down any comments or bugs. She also had a QR code for the survey, which we asked each play tester to complete once they had finished. I timed each playtest and we made notes on how quickly they passed through the dialogue section, and how long it took them to either fail or succeed.
To test our set up, we decided to conduct a playtest on some teammates first. We originally used Itch.io, but faced severe scaling issues so moved to Unity, which worked much better. After the fourth playtest, our first playtest with a course mate, we realised that play testers had no idea how to actually play the game. To combat this, Sophie advised us to write down some simple instructions which ended up helping – slightly.
Playtest notes:
Notable findings:
- Players died mostly to lack of Arms than to starvation
- this means most players understood that they needed to keep their survivors alive with food but did not understand that they needed to also gather resources by the end of the week.
- Bug with checking food needs to be fixed
- Transparency of placeholder sprites – UI needs to be more clear
- Goal of the game is unclear to some players, even with instructions
Average time taken to finish playing: 4min 25s
Bug report sheet:
Survey feedback:
Some extra comments from play testers and teammates:
- Playtesters attempt to drag empty slots instead of character sprites.
- When you fail, should you reset back at the camp or at the dialogue scene? – The camp.
- The progression requirement should relate to the dialogue scene Fallout-like terminal log telling you what to do.
- Ask adam about queen of the hill.
- Scraps should make tech and arms.
- Check peoples raspberri pi projects on youtube.
Our conclusion:
Our first playtest was successful, informative and exhausting. We realised pretty quickly that our main issues were lack of tutorial and UI clarity. But now we know what we need to focus our attention on next, and without having outsiders play the prototype we may not have realised this. We also received some great feedback that gave us new ideas of how to resolve some of the issues in our prototype.
My conclusion:
- People really enjoyed the art style of the game.
- The visual design helped players understand the task at hand.
- Most people agreed that the art style suited the game theme.
- One person thought the camp art didn’t fit with the surrounding styles (the UI) – which is understandable.
From this feedback I feel more confident about my role and more encouraged to polish my camp design, to help players understand objectives easily.
End of week 5 😀
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