Between week 11 and 12 was playtest day. Going into it, we had two main things we were testing for: Are our metaphors making an emotional impact, and are players making the connection to disasters. After testing, it seemed like the answer to both was “no”, however through the process we learned a ton about where our game was working, and where it was falling short.
On the plus side, people generally seemed to get that our game was artistic and metaphorical, and that there was some deeper meaning to all of our imagery. While people generally expressed some level of confusion, they also all seemed to agree there was some level of meaning under the surface, whether or not they understood what it was. It was very satisfying to see that people were interested in our game, and our interactions and imagery put them in the right mindset for interacting with it.
Beyond that, however, confusion began to set in. On our surveys afterwards, the most frequent responses were words like “confused” and “frustrated”. People appeared to be confused from the very beginning, and once they were confused it was hard for them to remain engaged with the game. So it seemed the pieces were there, we just needed a better way to ease them into it.
Fortunately, we got some great insights from talking with and observing our playtesters. For example, one couple found our developer tools, and began skipping around and replaying levels. This fostered great discussion and reflection, and while it was a total accident it’s now a feature we’re adding to the final game. Another tester stopped playing about 2 minutes into the experience, and went off on a 12 minute discussion of one of our scenes, and what it meant to her. While her interpretation wasn’t entirely accurate, it was really great insight into how powerful metaphors can be, and how much effort people put into interpreting them.
So weeks 12 and 13 were spent responding to these observations, as well as preparing for Soft Opening in week 14. One major change was an attempt to make the controls more obvious. If people were confused by the controls, it would make it much harder for them to pay attention to the rest of the game. We decided to add a help button that would flash the media player controls the player would need to solve the current puzzle. This put less burden on the player to puzzle solve, and put more emphasis on experiencing the content.
Another important change was adding an opening montage about disasters, as well as interspersing the piece with different clips from disaster-related media. Many people weren’t making the connection between our game and disaster, and not having that context was another thing that led to confusion and frustration. We believe the montage will give players disaster context from the very beginning, while the clips will continue to reinforce the message and make direct connections between our scenes and the real world.
We held a playtest for this new version on Friday of week 13, ahead of softs. In general this version was received much better, as people were actually able to make the connection to disasters. There was still some confusion around getting through certain scenes, and the controls in general weren’t as obvious as we like, but we’ve made huge strides towards making a game that is playable, understandable, and impactful.