Posts Tagged ‘playtest’

Call for testers

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

“Good news everyone!”

We have reached the point where we can start having some players test and try break things with the current pre-alpha-thingy-candidate version of the game. We are looking for just a couple of testers who can cope with the fact that they will get early spoilers and experience a not entirely finished game narrative and interface. On the other hand you will greatly help us stabilize things, spot a few more bugs and make final improvements!

Take into account that you will have to use an issue tracker to report us problems (ie, using a website with a form to check for existing known problems and report new ones) and that we will ask you some questions after you played.

Use the contact form in this blog to get in touch with us :)

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Posted in interface design, script writing, technical | 4 Comments »

Residency @ BALTAN – a report from Dave

Monday, October 18th, 2010

The residency we did in september at NIMk was almost exclusively using paper and pens as we were working together to design our game world. We could go for walks while thinking, and mostly keep to analogue methods.

This residency was very different – naturally at this stage focused on the software, we started with an initial list of showstopping things to fix, and then used online methods of organisation via mantis and the wiki.

We also presented the project for the first time, at NIMk’s space invaders event, and we had some super volunteers from Eindhoven Technical University Game Experience Lab to test the game (which Aymeric describes in more detail).

One of the things that I was pleased to get a chance to tackle was how to cope with the basics of online multiplayer games: (more…)

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Posted in technical | No Comments »

Meet the users: Playtest Session at Baltan

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

Today was a crucial and quite scary step for the project: playtesting.
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Posted in graphic design, interface design, technical | 2 Comments »

Sprint @ BALTAN Laboratories, day I

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

logo BALTAN laboratories

Monday October 11, the first day at BALTAN Laboratories in Eindhoven! We walked to the SWA building, through Phillips Complex S, and at the 8th floor gasped at the enormous space of the lab. After a grand tour by director Angela Plohman, we set up and started to write down the master plan for this week. Lots of decisions to make, especially after the playtests we’ve held. The feedback we received made sure we zoomed in on the parts that needed the most attention first.

First task was to make the interface more user friendly. Most playtesters were too busy trying to figure out what to type and how to type it, instead of discovering the game world. We decided to simplify the vocabulary, write more elaborate help texts in case of an error, and write a general “help” that gives an overview of the vocabulary, what each word does, tips to speed up navigation through the world and all this with clear examples.
(more…)

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Posted in contextual, interface design, script writing | No Comments »