First Playtest
On this Wednesday (10/07/2015), we drove to the Colonial School to do our first playtest. As for the goal of this playtest, we want to know students better includes their interest and game experience. Besides, we tested our art from the UI and spaceship model parts. We got lots of feedback from students about art and also core mechanism of our design, like how they know and how their cooperation abilities.
First, we had a simple introduction about ourselves. After that, we started to individually ask them general questions such as their hobbies and daily lives. Then we present our current art assets to them and ask their feelings. We asked the students to play our paper prototype one at first they can see their teammates’ cards. We played the paper prototype again and this time we let them cover their cards so each player only can see his own cards. We asked for their feelings about the “card game” they just played. We talked with the teachers about this playtest and also made the appointment for the next playtest.
Here’s the specific feedback we got from our first playtest:
- General Questions:
- The students there are much better than we expected and just like other teens they like action movies, hip-hop or R&B music, like cartoons and TV series. They have no special interest in Sci-fictions. They not play videogames too much, the games they mentioned are “Candy Crash” & “ Angry Bird”.
- Art Style
- All the students said they like the UI and they could get sci-fi feelings from the UI/Environment images. However they were not able to interact with UI in the tablet since we cannot run our demo in their school right now. And we will test the full setup UI in the tablet next playtest.
- Not too much feedback on the spaceship model.
- Paper Prototype
- We did three different types of prototype. At first, we gave each person 8 crystals, show to others, and let one of them triggers the ultimate skill. It takes 21 second for the first time. They just talked to specific person and ask him/her to help. After everyone tried to use the ultimate skill, they were familiar with the mechanism and did faster. Secondly, we reduced the number of crystals, only 4 this time, also face to all the player. The completed only in 14 seconds. Last time, we let one boy become the engineer, and 2 crystals for each player. They changed the way to communicate, not talk and focus on only one person. They asked all the players for help with a short time which is 12 seconds.
Art Work In Progressing
During this week, all the teammates were working so hard. We were preparing for the playtest and did the changes based on the feedback. From the art perspective, Sophia Xue completed the login and signup interface this week, and she’s still working on the choose level and character page. Emily Liu finished the model of spaceship and the set up about whole environment.
The Interface for Striker
The Interface for Engineer
Skill Icons
Spaceship
Environment Set up