Week 11: 3/28/16 – 4/2/16
Week 11 was a huge, crunch time lead up to the ETC Playtest Day on Saturday. Despite art for all characters not being complete, Phantasm wanted to be able to test out and iterate the full story with the playtesters coming in. To do this, we ended up using the same character model for all major story beats, just changing texture color and model sizes to differentiate between them. Our 3D artist, Tina, could then animate the same model with the appropriate animations for each story beat.
For the rest of the experience, we updated our interface as well based on feedback from Week 8 playtesting. We have added instruction and information screens to help inform the guest about the tasks they should be doing, with the controllers for the Vive vibrating for extra feedback. We have spaced out and slowed down the climax of the experience, and added in audio for the interface, the character interactions, and radio voiceover, with even some background music to enhance the climax.
We had approximately 30 playtesters come through, aged 11 – 60, with the vast majority of them reporting that their first brush with virtual reality was today, during ETC Playtest Day. We encountered a number of bugs with the character AI, and many guests, despite the voiceover intro, had difficulty figuring out the appropriate actions and way to interact with their environment and the characters around them. However, once guests figured out the correct way to go through the first encounter, they typically made it through the rest of the experience smoothly.
The implemented story beats seemed to be pretty emotionally effective, with the climax being extremely effective for every playtester who got through it. One woman was so surprised, she ended up throwing the Vive headset off her head completely when she reached the climax. Even with this audience, we still had very little reported nausea. Overall, playtesters reported extremely positive feedback to the experience, with the climax overwhelmingly being the favorite part.
Next week:
On Thursday of Week 12, we will be flying out to Burbank to visit Legendary’s office. There, the team will meet with several of Legendary’s executives, share our experience with the employees there, and finally meet the team that we’ve been speaking to and working with in person. We have a full day itinerary planned, being toured around the headquarters and speaking about our work, and finishing off the day with dinner and drinks. We will be putting in some small updates to the project and uploading our project files to Box so we can run the experience in California.