We had a large play-testing last Saturday!
More than 15 playtesters came to the playtesting session. The age range was quite wide, from 8 years old to 16 years old. We did get a lot of feedback and most of which is extremely useful.
On the one hand, we did get much positive feedback. Many of the testers believed that this is the first audio game that they have ever played. And using Tap to control the game is obviously a big contribution to the game which makes it far more immersive than just using the traditional touch screen. Since this is an ETC playtest event, the tester also tested other projects. And we have heard that some testers(mostly children groups) said to other projects that they love Houdini’s product!
On the other hand, it is more than obvious that we have a lot of terrible flaws which is actually expected because that playable teaser is rather an unpolished, unfinished and it just contains one simple story sequence without a tutorial. Most of the complains are about the UI and the story. Speaking of the UI, we are using a paged UI as you can see in the video. There are four pages in total. Sadly, not a single player actually swiped to change the page even if some of them claimed that they are familiar with the touch screen swiping UI. And although the UI is quite a minimalist and beautiful one, most of the players want more info on the screen. Another big issue about the UI is that players are still quite confused about where they are so we need to come up with some other ways to give players a better understanding of the location. Speaking of the story, since the story in the demo is just a very simplified single sequence, most of the feedback is expected. And this will be the most important part of the game which we will put more efforts on.
This week, we have designed a whole new UI set, we have got a tutorial sequence and we have a complete story now. And the most important shift for tour focus is that that playtest has proved that all the playtester looked at the screen all the time which made it sort of a failure for us considering that fact that we wanted a fully audio based game. And after several discussion, we have decided that we will not go for an audio-only game. What we really want is an experience which utilizes the audio as an important information source.
That’s all for this week, hopefully, we will have a new working game will a complete story before next Monday.