This week, fresh from the feedback we received from quarter presentations our team has driven into our production phase on all cylinders. As we continue to develop shippable content we also aim to iterate on ones we have already developed. We have sent out our first online survey this week, with the goal of finding out if our current content contributed to our project goals. We targeted 3 key features of our game, act 1 of our narrative, our main characters and our achievement system. The goal of act 1 of our narrative is to provide users with an engaging introduction to our narrative in a hope that it would provide them with extrinsic motivation to try and solve difficult competition questions. The first iteration of our story gave us promising results with over 70% of our play testers feeling interested in finding out more of the story, however, many play testers did feedback that they were somewhat disappointed with the protagonist’s behavior at the end of the act, and this would be something we will consider iterating to improve on our results.
Our 2nd iteration of our main characters also saw positive results. During our initial stages of testing, most of our play testers felt that our characters were too Caucasian, which was contradicting our project goal of ensuring the game was relatable to all backgrounds. After some changes our second iteration of the characters saw a more diverse range of ethnicities which testers felt our characters belonged too. With this data we are confident that players of all ethnicities will be able to connect with our characters.
Our final test was to determine if an achievement system could provide positive reinforcement to players by identifying their emotions when they were awarded with an achievement. This test also came back with positive results. More than 80% of our results reported positive emotions when a player was awarded with an achievement which to a large extent shows that positive reinforcement has been provided.
For the next 2 weeks, we will be focusing our efforts primarily on developing a playable level 1 with all its minimum shippable features including art assets. To continue our play testing sessions with testers within our target demographic to ensure there isn’t a significant variance between the data we have collected from the general public as compared to the data we will collect from testes within our demographic. Stay tuned to see assets in our completed level 1.
To view our full test data, visit this link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/
