WEEK 14 – SOFT OPENING

Art

According to the feedbacks from last playtest, we found it was not very effective to evoke players’ dilemma at the end of our story. Therefore, we decided to try another version of ending at soft to get feedbacks more efficiently. To bring more sympathy to the players, we eventually decided to change the ending from a child happily walk into the forest and pick up the flower to a child sadly walk into the forest and sobbing along the way… And the child will be surprised by you and then look at you as the player first entered the forest. Finally, we also added an interaction that only when the player looks at a flower, will the child pick up the flower. This week our artists are mainly focusing on tuning the adult human’s animation to be more consistent and also making new animations for the new ending.

Programming

For programming, we changed the particle effect of energy transition and flower material. Both of them looks more like blood now which fits our story better. In the ending of our game, to add text and cast together with fade to white, we created a new ending environment post processing material. The monster behavior became more fluent, and they will not always starring at the player this time. For reflection in the pond, we add the human model for the player. Players can see their own reflection in the pond before the transformation.

Soft Opening / Playtest

On Thursday of this week, we had a big event: SOFT OPENING. During soft opening, we had around 20 guests to playtest our demo. The whole flow was quite smooth and we got a lot of feedbacks and suggestions very efficiently. For soft opening, we prepared a totally different ending for our guest to test out how efficient to evoke dilemma from players. Among all guests, we found most of the guests understood the story and thought about the whole experience. More specifically, all the guests realized this is a story about cycle or loop. More than 15 of them was thinking about this experience at the very end of our story. However, most of them interpreted the dilemma differently from what we expected… They basically thought that the dilemma comes from the child that whether he should pick up the flower but not from the player himself… Emotionally, we found that the transformation part successfully evoked emotional feeling like, surprised, amazed, excited… However, the scary forest was not as effective to evoke the sacred emotion as the last version. We thought it may caused by the low volume of our background music and that the monsters are too far away to bring the sense of presence of the player.

Apart from the story and emotion side, we, again, got feedbacks that players do want to see their hands even if they cannot interact with the environment. Because of the difference of level of interactions, they felt the experience is inconsistent for a while until they accept the fact that they are not allowed to interact with the unfolding story. Therefore, we are considering adding objects or tracks to indicate controller movement. But it is still under discussion.