Week 7 was a very busy. We developed a lot of things and did playtests.
Progress
We polished our user journey map according to clients’ opinions. Now the structure of the experience is clearer, and better divided into puzzle scenes and feedback scenes. A great progress is we are now settled down on this structure.
Based on that, we developed a detailed narrative and the puzzles for Intro and Scene 1.
On Wednesday, We had our first playtest, exciting!
We had three sessions in total. The structure of each session is:
We welcome the players in and have a sit,
Have our facilitator starts with a brief description what they will do,
The facilitator starts the role play,
We give out the tutorial puzzle as an exam,(Intro scene)
The facilitator ends the exam and welcomes them to join Bletchley Park,
Start of Scene 1, with some role play,
The facilitator gives out the puzzle for scene 1,
They finish the puzzle.
Testing within the group with instructors.
Playtesters solving puzzle
Challenges & plans
We got a lot of useful feedback from the playtest sessions.
Puzzle:
The players kind of worked together on the big puzzle in scene 1. In some tests, they were discussing as a team. We found an interesting paradox: if we make the task more individual, they will feel more immersive in their roles, and specialize themselves from each other, but meanwhile, the collaboration in the puzzle will be less; in contrast, if we make the big puzzle more collaborative and let everyone do it together, they will feel less in their character and feel like all doing the same thing.
For this problem, we made some plan on adjusting roles of players, and will try some other solutions. Also, some basic refining on the puzzles is planned.
Narrative:
The players liked the story and were excited about doing a very special job in that time and event. But they were not super immersive since they felt they didn’t have time to talk about their roles and didn’t really roleplay in any time point. Furthermore, they would like more talking among themselves and less reading and listening to the instructions. We concluded the reason of this phenomena is that we were not very prepared for the playtest, and the time for each session was not enough, and we really wanted to test the puzzle, so the part of role play was cut off a lot, and we had to kick people out to have the next group come in.
We’ll better arrange our time the next time, and leave enough space for people to get into the character, and see how it will go.
Experience:
Like mentioned, timing is a thing we didn’t do well this time. However, the structure of this activity seemed good so far, and people could understand what are they doing in each part of the activity. Also, the lack of feedback session (Scene 2) was not included, so the players were very curious about what happened next.
The plan is to make Scene 2 and test the activity with it the next time. We’d like to see the emotional arc and a better flow of players.
Besides the playtest, our programmers also finished a paper prototype of the app that could be used to help the experience according to the suggestions from our clients.
In summary, we’re going to work on all the feedback, and develop more on story part. We scheduled our next playtest on next Tuesday. Looking forward to it!
