We have received a lot of useful feedback from soft opening and we made a lot of changes based on that.
1. We added a light bulb on the head of the fish to indicate whether the fish is being controlled. On soft, although we try to teach player about the basic mechanism of our demo, most of them could not figure it out quickly and easily which eventually becomes a big problem.
2. We added a tutorial part to the demo to teach player the light up mechanism at beginning. We do not expect them to know this mechanism immediately but we hope by introducing a tutorial we can help them get familiar with the mechanism more easily.
3. We added A LOT OF sound effect to indicate if they are doing right thing or at least at correct direction. We found out that many people would get stuck at somewhere when they played our demo on soft and most of them actually did not fail or do something wrong. It is because there is no enough feedback for them to understand and direct them to next step.
4. At first stage, we change the pure black object which needs to be light up to move to next stage to something that will keep shinning. We made this change to teach player that there is something different about that object and they should try to interact with that object using the cute little fish.
5. A really big but unexpected change! We removed hand model completely. We were not sure if this would work but some people mentioned that hand model was little distracted and they cant focus on the fish controlling part.
After making all of these changes, honestly we were not sure if they would work. So we conducted several playtest with our two instructors, several EA employees and some other students to see if they could work. Surprisingly, all of these fixed perfectly! We felt that people can go through our demo more fluently and finish it correctly. And they can immediately know what they need to do at each stage without getting stuck somewhere. We felt really satisfied about the changes we have made and we have more confidence right now that our experience could really bring something new to player!
