Dev Blog week 12: New Story Track & Playable Build

Dev Blog Week 12

New Story Track: A Career of Astronaut

This week, we worked on a brand new story track – “A Career of Astronaut” for our game. The previous story tracks that we already had – “Friend of the World” and “Musical Genius”. Both of them are realistic gameplay. Therefore, during the design of the new story track, we want to cover more diversity of the original The Sims game. We decided to go with one of the most popular directions of playing The Sims that we found from the online forum – Supernatural.

Playable build

The semester is almost ending, and it’s time to combine all the systems we have built. This week, we integrated the “Create A Sim” system with the core gameplay and give players a complete experience of our game. Players can now start from creating their customized Sim and choose the story track they want to start with. We also added the function of pre-built Sim in case some players want to skip the creating part. With all the components in place. We started our playtesting and iteration process.

Playtesting

Since this is the week of playtesting at the ETC, we also signed up for the playtesting and got several useful feedback from our faculties. Due to the current situation, we are not able to have in-person playtesting. This created a challenge for us since Alexa is not a popular platform that many people have experience and devices. Based on this, we have to set up the playtesting on the playtester’s mobile device. The process includes creating an account, downloading the Alexa App, and activate the beta test for our skill. We found this is extremely challenging to make it all correct at the same time without face-to-face setup. So we created an instruction document and video to guide the setup process for a smooth playtesting experience. Finally, we are able to test and collect much useful feedback.

Feedback from Playtesting

We got several interesting feedback from our playtesters. Some of them gave us useful direction for our iteration and some of them provided evidence that supports our design.

First few choice-of-2 or 3, OK, but then I felt constrained, wanted more agency
I wanted timing control so I could say first choice before 3rd is stated and it would go there
I liked the music store interaction a lot over the other “take care of (my Sim) with food/social/cleaning” less because I played long enough (20 min?) to hit the edges of the daily routine
I really really wanted to practice violin and hear the change over time (another plus, having dynamic behavior in-game). I really enjoyed hearing my poor violin playing, too.
Like the sound effects and Simlish (makes it feel part of that world)