After wrapping up some of the big revisions from our Soft Opening demonstration, this week was all about testing them to make sure they work when implemented with real players. On Wednesday, the ETC hosted a showcase to show off all of the semester’s projects to family, friends, and industry professionals. Throughout the event, we brought small groups into our room to try out playing a small vertical slice of our game, a single round of the narrative. It was a big chance to test whether or not our changes were a success.
With a focus on the holistic experience (instructions, understanding, flow), we ran the abridged playthrough three times. The changes were wildly successful. Our log-in time was cut-down to less than five minutes, and people really seemed to understand their goals. Particularly, people had a better grasp of their player-roles.
We wanted to test the whole experience, including the tutorial round, at least once all the way through, so we conducted a playthrough of all four rounds and the post-game discussion on Friday with some of our fellow students.
This full run-through taught us a couple small things about the game, but in general, it confirmed our results from Wednesday. The biggest change we decided to make was to give the Ancient One in VR the ability to ask the judge for one “fact check” during each round. This gives the audience players more of a hesitation in sharing lies, and it allows the VR player some more agency. We decided to do this using the MC instead of technologically because of the time limitations left before finals.
After fixing a few small technical bugs and implementing these slight design tweaks, our game was ready to show for finals.
