Today was a crucial and quite scary step for the project: playtesting.
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Posts Tagged ‘sprint’
Meet the users: Playtest Session at Baltan
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010Sprint @ BALTAN Laboratories, day I
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
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.
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NIMk Sprint day 5
Friday, September 3rd, 2010Our last day of intense work! This consisted of mopping up the details and joining the sections we’d finished from the previous days. It’s still hard to know how it will feel to play, and there will be much tweaking – but at least we have a lot of situations and game play which thread together into a complete path from the start to the end of the game.
Being careful to not give too much away, one of the things I’m looking forward to is a gradual opening up of the game as you progress. It moves from quite a fixed path, and opens up into problems with less rigidly defined solutions. The playtesting will be essential to get a real idea of how well it actually works, and allow us to fine tune/radically change sections.
NOP Sprint at NIMk started
Monday, August 30th, 2010Today was the first Naked on Pluto sprint day at the Netherlands Media Art Institute. We focussed on script writing and created this little masterpiece:
It’s an inventory of all our reasons for wanting to make this game and an attempt of integrating them into the game design in a meaningful way. We made lots of progress on the world and non-player character design. Tomorrow we continue with the design of a vertical slice and we’ll break our heads over some scalability problems.