The Saturday playtest went fairly well (the playtest was delayed from Friday to Saturday since power outages prevented a teammate from participating at the originally scheduled time). Overall the takeaways were as follows:
Went well:
- Players felt Transformed: All players expressed a newfound interest in the subject of US nuclear testing as well as a desire to learn more about the subject and its wide-reaching impacts.
- Artifacts were Cool: Players really liked looking over the articles and examining the materials in depth.
- Players wanted to act on their knowledge (i.e. budget): Players appreciated being able to express their newfound opinion in an actionable and tangible way by voting on the budget.
Need tweaks:
- Narrative was not meaningful: Players engaged with the roleplaying exercise but immediately set those details aside after encountering the objects. Who they were mattered less than what the artifacts were.
- Research progress was unclear/not goal oriented: Players got confused navigating between different items/tracking their progress through the 12 items. Additionally the goal of “find things to present to Congress to get money” was vague.
- Discussion was not collective/meaningful: Players submitted their opinions using the Google API and didn’t have a structured opportunity to talk to each other as a group
- Thinking and talking at the same time was hard: Players did NOT want to talk to each other while examining the artifacts in the room. They wanted time to process their own opinions independently without interruption.
With this feedback in mind, the team decided to pivot on the narrative/story and root it more tangibly/clearly. Rather than investigate a generic office, we focused the narrative around Dr. Charles Nolan, deputy director of the site in question. Dr. Nolan is based off of a true military Doctor who was involved at a nuclear test site. Design also restructured the flow of the experience to minimize individual roleplaying and onboard players into the narrative more clearly. Additionally, players would have to work together to complete the testimony as opposed to submit comments individually.
Programming made crucial UI tweaks to clarify progress through the scene and removed extraneous Roleplaying forms. Programming also implemented new 2D assets that better set the tone of the game. Art also created a gold spike object to capture the textured look of the room, since some playtesters commented on the placeholder grey textures.
Plans for week 10 included scheduling a new playtest for the new narrative and testing whether these narrative tweaks would enable our experience rather than obfuscate or confuse players.