This week we conducted our first group of playtests with a set of eight playtesters.
Our overall agenda was to assess how viewers are responding to the world and the arc of the experience. Considering that the agenda was exploratory, we used the format of an interview to over that of a survey so that the session can adapt to the playtester. While everyone agrees the environment and sound is quite visually pleasing, the world is currently not hitting at any specific meaning. This means people aren’t really able to derive meaning from the world in any way. The specificity of some lines of dialog and the abstraction of others is confusing players. Turns out the phrasing of these lines and specific word choices are a lot more important than we thought since they are the only guiding sources in the experience. And finally there are certain parts where the implementation is simply lacking to assess what we need. For example, the spring is currently not being associated as the source of the voice at all making the dialog feel disembodied. Some of these we had expected while others we hadn’t and each problem will be iterated on in our prototype.
