On September 21st we invited several EA employees and our fellow ETC students to try out our first prototype of Torch. We had sixteen people test the game in groups of two or three, and we received lots of great feedback!
We set up in a large conference room, using a Unity PC build of the game as our server (connected to the TV by HDMI) and a Unity Android build on four different mobile devices, which connected to the server wirelessly.
We invited our guests to first try out the game. Since this is our first prototype we only had a handful of features in and no real objective, so we asked players to go find an item and then meet up in the largest room. Right away we knew our experience was going to have some unique challenges – it wasn’t obvious to players at first that they could look at the TV for more information!
We treated each play session as an observation study, timing how long players took to explore the space and developing a sense of how they became familiar with the game and interacted with one another.
After trying the game, we had our guests take a survey about their experience with questions about whether they felt lost, how much they looked at each screen, and how they interacted with other players. Finally, we asked them to help us by giving feedback on some of our character concept art.
The amount of feedback we got from this playtest was overwhelming – our guests requested dozens of possible features and improvements to our game, from camera improvements to a rule about getting eaten if you’re in the dark too long. Naturally we can’t take all of the recommendations, but we’ve integrated many of them into our design and used all of the feedback to pinpoint the biggest issues with our game right now.
Our biggest concern after this playtest was that 100% of players spent most of their time looking at the mobile device screen, and not up at the TV. We feel that for the experience to really show off the technology, players need to look at the TV at least 50% of the time, and we were nowhere near that target after this test. Therefore, some of the first changes we made to our prototype after the test were lighting and camera changes that would get players to rely more on the television. Future playtests will reveal if our strategy has worked!