Updates
We successfully completed our first major playtest with 8th-grade students from South Fayette Middle School, Pittsburgh. Four students played our game which included the first chapter of the story. Additionally, we had another 3 players test our game over the weekend. Our takeaways from the playtest were:
- Some players found the characters and dialogue interesting.
- There were several bottlenecks in terms of UI interactions which frustrated the player.
- We noticed that some players deliberately selected the wrong choices just to see what would happen. This could also be a sign of boredom.
- All players felt that the volume of text was a bit high.
Design
This week, we finished the design for level 2 so that we could have another build ready as soon as possible. The content for level 2 was complete. This included a new topic – a semi-logical argument about air fryers being healthy. A design choice that we made was to use 3 keywords to be entered into the search bar in order to reveal the actual correct article.
- 3 different keywords to be discovered.
- 5 different web pages that contained clues about the argument.
- Only 1 page out of these is the correct answer.
- Other 4 pages act as clue providers.
Art
We added more detail to the phone’s frame to let it stand out
One of the recurring feedback that we got was that the pure-anime art style that we chose could not show diversity very well. As we wanted our game to be inclusive, we tried a new approach to our art style.
![7ZB%WILPSV[R{M]`]I(MT`L](/2021/spring/expose/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/7ZBWILPSVRMIMTL-p6gtstvhb80v85v965i3pe9og6unaqn7zp8bc1e1hc.png "7ZB%WILPSV[R{M]`]I(MT`L")
Tech
Complete flow control was integrated into the engine. The flow can now be controlled easily just by adding commands in the dialogue files.
We also added functionality for highlighting specific elements on the screen to call attention to it. This proved to be very useful in onboarding our players to the game interface.
In the upcoming week, we aim to complete the second chapter and playtest it with our target demographic.