Week 7: Testing our prototypes and preparing for Halves

We’ve been very busy this week preparing for Halves next week, and so most of the work this weeks has been solely on that front alone. That being said, we did try to do a little bit more playtesting of our Treehouse and Virus vs. Cells prototype at the beginning of the week, just so that we had a bit more user data to determine which prototype to go forward on.

The Work This Week

Our Last Round of Prototype Playtesting

We playtested the Treehouse and Virus vs. Cells prototypes for the last time this week, in order to determine which one of the two we should continue to work on in the second half of the semester. From these sessions, we received the following feedback:

• Virus vs. Cells Prototype
  • Players really liked the ability to split themselves into multiple players, as well as the schadenfreude that emerged when we told them they could merge the other player back into themselves
  • Our playtesters were pretty quickly able to get a handle of the controls, since they matched 1:1 to what you expect a platformer would control like
  • However, regarding the merging function, the players who would get merged back often felt powerless and frustrated
• Treehouse Prototype
  • Players enjoyed the ability to explore the map over time, as well as the fact that they could see the vast changes that had been made to the game when another player invited them back to play
  • Our playtesters also really enjoyed having the ability to literally build upon previous players work, as it felt like their actions had some meaning
  • However, just like the Virus vs. Cells prototype, our playtesters sometimes felt powerless in the overall decision making of how the tree grows, since that is something that is determined solely through the actions of the tree player
  • While we had created an artificial stop to the game for the sake of our playtests, we still had a huge problem in terms of the fact that the Treehouse prototype has a largely ambiguous end state, since you could theoretically continue building up your tree forever.

Halves Prep

For our Halves presentation next week, we made sure to not only create an effective PowerPoint that documented our overall journey this semester in our exploration of how to utilize State Share as a game mechanic, but also decided to bring down our two paper prototypes for our audience to playtest for themselves after the meeting.

Tune in next week for the video of our presentation, from which you will be able to see the fruits of our labor!

Client Meeting

We closed out the week with our client meeting on Friday, since we wanted to meet with Erin one last time before Halves. Our main concern that we wanted to bring up was trying to determine which prototype we should go forward on, as our playtest results didn’t really help us too much in making that final determination.

Ultimately, in our client’s view, we essentially had built two different kinds of games: a skill-based game (Virus vs. Cells) and an expressive game (Treehouse). Of these two kinds of games, expressive games are usually the hardest to build in a short time period, as you have to answer esoteric questions like “what does meaningful player-to-player interaction look like,” which could on their own eat up weeks of development time. As such, simply evaluating from a scope perspective alone, our Virus vs. Cells prototype is the better prototype to go forward on, as it would be the faster prototype to construct in the time we have left in the semester.

Based off of this advice, we have definitely decided that we will move forward with our Virus vs. Cells concept, which we will formally announce in our presentation next week!

The Plan for Next Week

As next week is Halves Presentations, we have nothing else planned outside of refining our current presentation. Be sure to check our blog for Week 8, as we’ll be posting a video of our presentation there!