👻 Recap! 

Hello, howdy, and welcome again fellow ghostly companions! We are continuing to report that our development of Get Out of My House is progressing on schedule! Don’t fret about the bugs ahem humans running loose for now as we are taking care of that soon.

📌 Week 3 Sprint [Goals and Dues]

Our focus for this week’s sprint is to begin playtesting our build to see where we should focus on completing and refining the gameplay experience. We want to make sure your experience as a player is as SPOOKTACULAR as possible, and we intend to gather as much feedback as possible to consider your thought so far to make  For our development team to truly succeed in understanding and implementing our intended gameplay functionality, we aimed to address and complete the following tasks during this past week:

• Playtesting for possession feel
• Fully Greyboxing and Polishing Level Layouts
• Polish the Player Experience and Gameplay (Controller, UI, Mechanics, etc…)

🕹️ Playtesting

After weeks of development, we finally got around to getting our game tested by fellow designers and staff! Through playtesting, we hoped to gather feedback on the game mechanics and levels we had designed so far, setting our developer biases aside to hear what our potential player base thinks about the state of the build so far. We first gauged their initial experience prior to the playtest, looking to see if there is a variance in intuitiveness or appeal based on their gaming background.

Charts 1 & 2: Pre-test responses, indicating players with a good amount of gaming experience, but diverse puzzle experiences.

🤝 Enjoyment

Chart 3: Post-test survey results, shows playtester enjoyment of their respective sessions, rated from “Not Fun” to “Very Fun” rating.

Noticing the diverse gaming demographic, we decided it would be insightful to compare this data alongside their enjoyment, pinpointing if there was a correlation with that and their prior experience with puzzles. Furthermore, this helped us determine if we were truly catering towards the beginner, family-friendly player base. We first gathered the enjoyment ratings from our playtesters, which showed the game state so far received decent to thorough contentment from the playtest (which is wonderful news!). 

From the data from both pools, we put them into a comparative line graph, demonstrating how their prior experience affected their enjoyment of the level. 

Chart 4: Scatter Plot with lines, displaying the correlation between playtester’s prior experience and their overall session enjoyment of Get Out of My House.

As it turned out, our data showcased that testers who had less experience with puzzle games had a higher rating of enjoyment, and vice versa. Based on the results, it is safe to say that our design succeeded in catering to our target audience, but needs more fine-tuning to make the experience enjoyable for everyone regardless of prior experience.

🤝 Tutorialization

Since the build at the time did not feature a tutorial section, we developers had to step in and initiate the teaching section verbally. While the players were able to get accustomed to the controls quickly (4.57/5 rating of understanding), many players expressed confusion when figuring out what to do with their ghostly perks, unanimously stating they did “not knowing the first steps” (playtester 3) without a developer’s help. The onboarding process is something we hope to look out for in our future weeks of development as we cannot rely on in person prompting when the game is eventually shipped. We hope to use the NPC stationed in the first level to create a tutorial sequence and allow players the time to get accustomed to the controls.

Chart 5: Bar Graph, showcasing mixed feelings about the tutorial (or lack of tutorial and reliance on the developers for help).

Worries about the lack of tutorialization continue to arise when playtesters were inquired about their experience navigating the first, introductory level. Rated a 3.71 and 3.29 when asked about finding and getting to their human objectives respectively, it made us consider how to optimize the layout such that identifying objectives felt more intuitive and easier for players, especially given this is meant to be the easiest level between the three. 

🤝 Possession

With this enjoyment also came the finickiness of possessing objects, as playtesters had concerns with the hitbox and camera work of some of the interactions, sometimes causing motion sickness or visual obstructions. At times, playtesters also voiced concerns regarding not knowing what items were possessable or not, most likely due to the highlight indicator’s range requiring players to be up close to realize an object is possessable. As players should always be aware of what is possessable, we wish to take note of this feedback and ease the experience in identifying possessable objects and allow them to focus on the puzzle solving and interactions instead. Touching up these interactions will be duly noted on our next bug fixing session as we attempt to optimize the gameplay experience to make the viewing experience as comfortable as possible.

Players have expressed a great appeal to the rubber duckie despite the difficulty of possessing it. We are glad all items were enjoyed to some extent, and it goes to show that the charm of the item appeals to each their own.

Despite the difficulties triggering the possession, we are happy to report that the interactions and outcomes themselves have performed exceptionally according to our playtesters, as they enjoyed the outcome of scaring their human objectives.

✨ Level Polish

With the playtesting feedback, we proceeded to rethink how to represent our intended game experience, being especially careful with how we presented new mechanics and intended routes to the player. 

LEVEL 1 - Before                                                       After

Images 1 & 2: Level 1, noticeable change in light mechanic emphasis tied to the first possession interaction. Furthermore, pathing has since changed to make the player's navigation feel smoother.

Given the feedback we received, we felt it was essential to focus on the player experience and feel, above all else, that they would not be able to enjoy the game as intended otherwise. To truly immerse them in this haunting experience, we’ve implemented visual and audio indicators whenever a notable change occurs within the gamespace, reflecting how their actions affect their environment and eventually help them with their objective.

GIFs 1 & 2: Level 1, the car now has an obvious visual change to indicate that the player has taken possession of the object. Additionally, Human NPCs now react when possession interactions are performed successfully.

Admittedly, we have ways to go if we were to truly create an immersive possession experience, however, we believe this is a great step up from our previous iteration in terms of signifying to the player any progressions they’ve made in the game. We hope to continue on this path and find ways to truly make this ghostly extermination believable and enjoyable for our players.

🤝 More Interactions!

✨ Player Experience & Gameplay 

⁉️ Conflicts & Concerns

Given the setup and nature of our project, we initially believed it provided us creative freedom to individually work at each of our levels based on our collective understanding of the mechanics and premise we’ve created. However, we’ve became so focused on our own levels, that we had overlooked how it worked in conjunction with one another, and how it set up the game’s pacing between each level. Not only did gameplay somewhat vary between levels, but a noticeable difficulty spike became apparent when transitioning from Level 2 to Level 3. What’s more, is the possession mechanic still had ways to go before the ghostly possession experience is fully considered immersive. We have since shifted our focus towards refining the feel of the game and pouring our energy into making the haunting experience more engaging and delightful, hoping to implement more believable and captivating feedback that allows players to truly immerse themselves in the ghostly exterminator role.

💬 What’s Next?

As we wrap up setting the foundational aspects of our project, we hope to move forward with polishing up what has already been made for the game and clear any jarring or bug breaking interactions. We hope to improve the flow of our game by taking note of the feedback our playtesters have given us and adjust the following aspects of our game accordingly:

• Polishing the Level Pathing and Puzzle Solving gameplay experience following feedback.
• Touch up any remaining UI, narrative cutscene transitions, and additional elements that teach the player the premise and controls.Tying together gameplay systems with the narrative to create a full gameplay loop.
• Implement visual and sound indicators and cues to create a more captivating gameplay experience based on the foundational systems.
• Patching any outstanding or immersive breaking bugs that disrupt players’ experiences.
• Preparing any promotional material for our showcase for Ubisoft.