This week began with our Soft Opening demonstration for the faculty, and depending on how you look at it, it was either a disaster or a major success. On the one hand, the playthrough fell apart. On the other hand, it taught us a huge amount about our game. After all, in some respects, it was our first real test of the experience back to front, and we knew there were going to bumps along the way.
During the playtest, the faculty and other guests were very confused about their roles in the experience. In particular, people didn’t understand why some of them received headlines and others didn’t. Additionally, there was a general sense of confusion as to why one would want to like certain headlines and not others. It didn’t feel meaningful. Not to mention, nobody was really invested in their teams winning the game. Instead, people spent more time experimenting with the technology than emotionally investing. There were several things about the experience that didn’t reflect the intended design such as a small bug in the app and a lack of a tutorial round. Nonetheless, after some tough discussion, we came up with the following list of fixes:
- Convert the audience role into two separate roles: media and citizen. The media’s only job is to share headlines, but they get two every round. The audience’s role is only to like headlines.
- Only display the top four headlines to the player in VR with the hope that this makes liking feel more significant.
- Change the reliability percentages of the news headlines into simple “true” and “false” statements.
- Revert back to splitting the audience into two halves of the room by team as well as introducing many team-building elements such as armbands and nametags to increase team pride.
- Re-record new voice over narration with an emphasis on the audience. Instead of the narrator talking to the Ancient One, the new voice over would talk directly to the audience.
Our goal moving forward is to implement these changes as quickly as possible to give us time to test before the end of the semester.
Our game mechanism then:
