Playtest Day was quite an eye-opener for us. It is very easy to lose sight of different perspectives and different ways of understanding directions. As a group, we’ve been working very in depth on mechanics and actions within our experience that guide us though the story. Since we’ve effectively been going through the motions for several weeks, it is easy to forget that other individuals, ones who have never experienced our story, may not have the same thought process as they go through the story.

The two main topics that we realized we need to re-think within our experience were:

  • The introduction, where we introduce the guest to their table and stamp
  • Properly directing guest attention.

The experience’s introduction is an area that we have struggled with the most these past few weeks. We need the guest to do a number of actions, including physically moving towards their actual desk, and putting their controller onto the table so that the Magic Leap can recognize that this is an actual surface where it will map objects to. The action of the guest putting their controller on the desk had an unintended effect. Almost all of the playtesters wouldn’t pick the stamp back up. The reasoning behind it was that they thought that the object has served its purpose, and therefore was not needed. Hardly anybody realized that the controller was actually their stamp. This was most likely exacerbated by the limited field of view of the device, since it is not a natural action to hold your hand in front of your face.

In addition, once we notified the guest about the stamping mechanism, they went one of two ways: Either they still didn’t know what/where/when to stamp, or they proceeded to try to stamp everything. The latter was actually an issue because there were several instances that they cut the experience short because they stamped the folder too early, triggering subsequent events within the story, effectively breaking the game. While this can be slightly fixed by only having the stamp register after a particular event (instead of constantly), the underlying problem of the guest not being entirely sure of when and how they need to stamp is one that we will need to tackle. We can’t provide a “Tutorial”, as it will break immersion, but we probably could rewrite the script to incorporate a learning moment while still being part of the story.

We hope that this uncertainty of what to do and where to look overlaps with guest’s unsure attention. This, coupled with a greater fine-tuning of spatial audio controls should help with directing the guest where to look. Attaching the sound sources directly to the main characters, as well as the portals on the walls will help immensely. In addition, allowing some time for exploration of the room will also help orient the guests. All of our playtesters wanted this opportunity, so we’ll need to figure out how to let happen naturally within our story…