Playtesting & Feedback

Week 9 Session 1

The version for playtesting is the build from my first greybox prototype. I still could apply some recognised principles and experience from this playtesting to my new version one.

Through the screen recording, I recognised some key points to work on my build more to fix the issues. These two videos are both from my highschool friend as the first one is totally fail. She had fallen out of the build even before starting navigating around. I set the starting point near the edge of the terrain so it was easy to fell out of the ground when first looking around. 

To fix it, I created a very thin cube layered under the terrain with mesh collider. For further effective approach, I would create a new terrain with the build in the middle of it so the players can go around more freely.

As my intention, the playthrough was very simple and the navigation didn’t take time. It wasn’t hard to get a hint of all the gates and go through them. However, the surroundings were filled with big objects like trees and rocks so they also caught attention to look at. 

For further playtesting and survey in class, I received quite similar feedback about the bad experience when my classmates all fell out of my build :) I’d added mesh collider to all objects but not their sub folders so the players still got trouble while going around.

Besides, I didn’t set the appropriate position to all assets so going straight was actually going under some objects. They floated in the air.

However, some positive feedback are about the scenery environment and natural plants I tried to build. There are good points that they all recognised the theme and the meanings implied in the game which I found it should be difficult to get that specifically. Especially someone figuring out that ‘the environment is not only about the physical world but also your mental world’ is the entire point of my work.

I still need to move forward and develop more on what I have now. The scene hasn’t been completed yet even the players catch the glimpse of feelings pretty well. It will not take time to add the mesh collider properly to create better experience but I should spend time build a bit more complicated navigating ways to ensure the game is not boring to play.