Questionnaire
1. What was the story in the animatic?
2. Is the explanation too wordy/technical?
3. Are the tissue slides clear?
4. Do you feel like you’re getting good feedback as you progress through the game?
5. Are the puzzles challenging?
6. Is the time for the antigens too fast or too slow?
7. Is the game’s tone pleasant/enjoyable/funny?
8. Would you prefer a voiceover for the explanation and in other places?
9. Which ending did you get?
10. Did you have fun?
Generally, the responses I got were about lack of clarity. The early "explanation" page seems to have been far to cobbled-together for the testers' liking. Instead, I re-wrote the page and added a couple of demonstrative images. Additionally, I wrote the page in a character voice, in order to make it more interesting and compelling.
There was also an apparent lack of clarity in the animatic; this is the same problem I had during the in-class discussion, in which it seems that the story of the animatic was less that clear. About a quarter of the testers understood the story completely, and half understood it well enough to feel compelled to continue with the game. The main complaint was about the adult to child transition, over which I intend to put a voiceover saying something akin to "many years earlier," or some such.
There were also complaints of the antibody images being too large to compare, which I assuaged fairly easily, as well as mentions of the tissue-sample-progress-pages being somewhat inscrutable. I have added some light dialogue in order to give the player a feeling of how things look at a given point.
Luckily, the gameplay itself seems to have been both enjoyable and difficult, spanning the two very well. Most players scored one of the middle-tier endings, until they intentionally worked toward a different ending.
My Thoughts
This has been a wonderful class. I thoroughly enjoyed both the lecture and the workshop sessions, and I felt that the teaching style was very much a sort of comfortable back and forth rather than a "this is what I say so you should do it" vibe.
The process of making this game was very interesting for me. I feel as though it has less replayability than I would like for a couple reasons. First, the gameplay itself would become dreadfully repetetive, and while I added the timed aspect in order to make it more exciting, it still is not the type of game I would personally play more than once. I believe that the physics-based idea I began this process with had a lot more potential- both for gameplay and for narrative- though I understand that it was impossible with the time and resources available to us.
I learned a lot about the value of planning ahead- once I had made the twine story map, I felt as though I had practically made the game; all that remained was the detail work. It was immensely satisfying to me to see the game come to life, and to hear the good reviews even from playtesters who weren't my friends. All in all, I feel that I've learned a lot from this experience, and that I would like to continue working on small-scale story games in the future.
Thanks for a great semester!