The Work This Week
Playtest
The team has been carrying out the usability playtest this week. The main goal of usability playtesting was to find bugs in our current game build and potential problems that will harm the user experience.
In terms of next week’s ETC playtest, we have been preparing the user accounts, playtesting questionnaire, as well as working on polishing the game.
User Experience
As suggested by our clients, the team this week has been putting much effort into enhancing the user experience, including:
- Adding onboarding section where the game introduces the backstory, three systems (upgrading, mining, and trading), as well as the goal. The programmers managed to create a separate and customizable game object in Unity to make it more editable.
- Unifying UI layout in the game. In some pre-playtest, we were told that the trading, disposing UI is not correctly working and the UI is not clear enough for them to understand. Since Muzi had prepared UI prefabs, it’s relatively easy for us to change the layout without adding too much workload.
- Balancing the game: adjusting tokens players started with, adding limited times for mining, adjusting the travel time so players won’t wait for 45 minutes to travel to the furthermost planet.
We will keep watching how our game runs in the following week’s playtest, and making adjustments accordingly.
Client Meeting
This week’s client meeting was pretty normal as we showcased our latest build and received some feedback from our clients. In general, our clients were relatively satisfied with what we’ve so far but also suggested that our onboarding process could be less confusing if the player is shown that they are inside a ship before they can see the whole solar system. Also, it’s an interesting “coincidence” that the player is waking up at the start of the story as that is a common thing from past games.
The Plan for Next Week
During the course of week 11, HyperPickle will actively carry out playtesting with possible faculty members, fellow students, and guests. We will be focusing on the “fun” factor and balance of the game specifically, and as we want to make most of this valuable chance, we will spend time giving out and analyzing playtest surveys, even if possible, conduct interviews with some participants.