Last Saturday’s playtest gave us a lot of confidence. Our target audience was able to use our tool to create games. The progressive puzzle builder, which is the main difference between this project with last year’s Alice’s Adventure project, works well. They love the streamline and straight-forward approach to create games and puzzles. However, the tool was still far from the perfect. Addressing the usability issues and the needed features was something we would like to do this week.

The Sprint

Since this week is a short week with Spring Carnival and the semester is ending soon, we were no longer adding too many features to the tool. What we did is to add some essential features needed by the playtesters and to improve the usability once again.

The Focus

• Add more essential features
  • Talk to the character
  • Customize the sound effect after a puzzle is completed
  • Setting the winning condition
• Fix the usability issues we found in last Saturday’s playtest
  • Text clarity (remove the ambiguity of “which is” clause)
  • Visual hints (make tabs, object descriptions more noticeable and have visual aids to organize the puzzles)

The Result

New Features

For new features, we added the three major listed above. The player can now add the message that a character will tell you in the character’s attribute panel. Also, the player can have two optional edits to the puzzles: to make it as a winning condition or to add a completion sound effect to it. After setting a puzzle as the winning condition, when a player completes the puzzle, there will be a winning image overlaying the screen.

Usability Improvement

The usability improvements are mostly focusing on text clarification and visual hints as mentioned before. We slightly changed the wording in the puzzle builder and increased the font size. Also, we moved some important attributes like object description and conversation up, to a more visible position. Furthermore, our biggest change happened to puzzle cards. We re-colored it, optimized the word flow and marked the dependencies across puzzles.