Week 12: Playtest, Bug Fixes, and Iterate

With our Hint system implemented, we wanted to find out how players would respond to having hints in the experience and what they thought about it.

Lesson 1: Ako always Listens – Not great!

Ako is constantly waiting for the players to talk so that he can help them. However, if he doesn’t understand what they say and it is not part of his database in Dialogflow, he responds with a fallback intent.

But, players often talk to themselves or mumble. Ako often mistakes this as a player’s intention to speak to him. Thinking about everything players could mumble and classify these speech for dialogflow to understand could lead to an infinite set of possiblities.

So, we decided to just mimic a person’s natural flow of actions when talking to someone: they look at them!
Therefore, Ako only listens to the player when they are looking at them – when he is only in the Field of View of the player.

Lesson 2: People miss Ako’s hints when concentrating on the cards

When people play the real game, they often concentrate on finding the Set and don’t look around. Naturally, they miss it when Ako gives hints. We decided to give Ako sounds so that he could grab a player’s attention.

Lesson 3: Ako’s non-word sounds can be hard to make

Ako uses Amazon Polly services to speak. But Polly can only read words and understand phonemes. Any sounds like laughing, humming etc needs to be processed and created externally.

Lesson 4: Often test for bugs

With our small playtest session, we discovered a couple of bugs and cases that were unhandled. These were also fixed after the playtest.