Dev Blog week 7: Halves Presentation & Feedback

Dev Blog Week 7

Halves Presentation

This week, we had a half presentation in front of a lot of guests at Electronic Arts. We talked about our design process of the game from where we started to create a long-term retention experience to the latest aspiration story tracks. We learned a lot in the first half of the semester since none of us have experience designing a voice-driven game. We use a lot of playtesting internally and weekly with our client to verify the direction. We found this method guided us well toward the right track. The following is the video of our presentation.

Feedbacks

After the presentation, we got a lot of useful feedback from both the guests and the faculties in Pittsburgh. We have a design meeting afterward to discuss the answer to them.

What is the ultimate goal/achievement at the end of the aspiration?

We want to have small rewards for achievement, and a larger reward for the aspiration completion. The larger reward could be an in-game gift that will affect the next aspiration story. By setting up this mechanism, it will create more possibility for the player to explore by playing the aspiration tracks in a different order. Besides, this also sets up a system for our Client to add features to it later in the future.

What else can I do with my character if he/she finished all the aspirations? Can I play through all at once? Should you force episodic play?

Players can restart from the beginning or continue playing the same character in the next aspiration story track. Currently, we don’t have an ending cause we want the game to be extendible and we want to focus more on the experience during the game. But we also know that to end in a successful way is important.

Avoid being bored, stuck in the loop of the daily routine

This is one of the largest pivots in our game. The original design was focused on the daily routine, but we found out the experience is not what we expected. Players can feel bored easily when looping in the daily routine. We tried several ways such as autonomy mode to address this, but still not working really well. Currently, we have a discussion with our client that maybe we would focus on aspiration first and come back to review the daily routine later.

Will you measure if non-ETC-SV-student players stay with it overtime to get a metric on the appeal of the experience (that players want to get to hosting the party and the end of what you set up as goal for the work)?

We are planning to set up a telemetry system later in the semester to collect the player’s behavior. It could be a great way to understand how the players play our game and answer more design questions based on the result.