MDJ IST

I’m glad we could to show our game at this playtesting event. There were very different kind of players that had interest in adventure games and we had the opportunity to observe their play very closely.

I took turns with Birgit and Petra in writing the observations. Before and after play we asked the player some questions, first the demographic data and after about pet interaction evaluation. Some people commented our game even during the play and were telling us their recommendations even about things we weren’t asking. Some people on the other hand responded very briefly. There very only very few ones who did not finish the game, because of their time constraints.

My last part of finishing the Game was to continue creating videos. I ended up with 4 videos (including already mentioned videos in the last post): The intro with the story, that happened to be a bit too long, a video in which the mole is digging and then leaving into the direction of the village, the video how the fence opens after the clock riddle was solved correctly and the outro with an earthshake and the tunnel and story.

MOJO: we arrived at Taguspark at 9 and began to prepare our “booth”. We provided two laptops, we had the control sheet(s), the poster, and small flyers that were handed over to the player with their own achievements (thanks to my colleagues). 

Luckily we had a good estimation of the duration of one session, so doing one playtest took about 30 minutes. We had about 15 people who tested our game, some of them didn’t finish the game, but in terms of feedback and player sessions the number is not bad in my opinion. We still have to analyze the results and write the final report. 

Well it’s been quite busy week, my part lay mostly within making dialogues, which was not the most pleasurable thing since our dialogue engine is not really advanced and clever as wee would need it. Therefore there had to be a lot of dialogue files, some of them differ only a little bit. Each one has to be called in a specific situation in the script, depending on the circumstances and choice of the player.

I was also adjusting other details, e.g. putting captions and highlight over interactable objects, making a tombstone more obvious for the player, since it is a longterm goal.

We are almost at the end of our work, unfortunately new todos show up all the time, some are smaller, some are bigger. The smaller ones I worked on last week: *finishing the assets on the island *make a better model for the crank of the final riddle instead of just a cylinder *make paths on the textures of the island *improve the texture for the middle of the riddle *... Bigger things I worked on: *adding canvases for videos - intro, outro, mole, fence and start playing the videos at the right time *create the corresponding videos (intro, outro, mole, fence). Right now there is only the mole video and the fence video done (it was really hard to find a good software for video editing...). Althought I am intending to make the fence video again since the assets changed, so it looks also nicer in the video.

This is how the final island will probably look like:

And one frame of the mole digging video:

I was also working on the playtesting plan last week. I wrote the new scenarios in the two documents, the concept and the playtesting plan. We decided to focus on the abilities, so it is also necessary to implement them, thats something else I spent the last week with. There are still a few (small) things missing regarding the abilities, but basically it is possible to use them and they fulfill their purposes. 

I was also working on the weather. Our circle should change the weather accordingly, that is a part of the riddle and a nice feature, that’s why we don’t want to miss it. I had to deal with particle systems and skyboxes in unity to build clouds and rain and night. That requiered also to create assets with photoshop. These are two images that show the result of the weather work:

Unfortunately the ingem weather doesnt look as good as from farther away like in the image.

This week we delivered our playtesting plan and concept documents. In the end we splitted some parts to finish. My main responsibility was the part about game progression in the concept document. In regards of implementation, I joined Danny, to help him with replacing of default Ethan with our male character - who we call new Ethan.

We discovered that, we are not able to map the model made by Magda to humanoid shape of unity. So I changed a character controller a bit. Also, we were using the root motion for the main character, so we needed different export (not walking in place) from tool she is using. This caused us lot of troubles and we were working on it for couple of days.

We finished it yesterday, so now my next step is to make the mechanism to save states of the game to trigger correct game events. This should also influence which type of answer in dialogue are enabled. We described our choices tree in document, so the next step is to translate it into the game. Additionaly, I was working on introductory video to the game. I discussed that with my artist friend Zuzana and she will draw for us 4 pictures which will be use for that purpose. We will describe the story and situation by them. First one is below:

This week we made a lot of work in our Unity project. Also we were preparing playtesting and concept document for submission. 

In the playtesting document, I was responsible for the chapter about logging, observing and also added content for the design subquestions. 

In the project I was creating details to some objects, so the player can examine them closely in 2D pictures. It is important e.g. for the gravestone, where a hint for a riddle will be placed.

This week we were preparing scenario and the unity project for the final prototype. At first we had in mind a different plan and scenario, but after the lab we decided to change it and maked it more focused - mainly on employing the pet abilites.

We were thinking about the possibilities how to make the testing interresting for the player but at the same time reuse as much models we currently have as possible. Now we will need only 2 additional models from our artist. Also we wanted to give to the player the opportunity to use all the pet abilities but at the same time not force him to do so. Now we can also test if the player finds it attractive to use the pet for getting further in the game or not. For example we will have a track of a pet leg on the ground to make it obvious for the player he should use tracking to find a place of another pet. He can either use the pet ability or find the other pet just by himself, which will be possible but more difficuilt.

Besides taking part in making the scenario, I was also working on the unity project - replacing the default Ethan model with the male character we have from Magda. This includes mapping the bones for the unity humanoid skeleton. replacing the default animations with the new ones and overall tranfering and adjusting all the settings from Ethan.

I spent some time with remodeling the island so it fits in proportion to the space that is needed for the movement of the main character and that is similar to our low-fi prototype. It is still smaller than it would be if everything from our original island would be included in the demo. I also fixed the script with turning the pointer and circles that we need for the riddles (think I never mentioned that I wrote them in the first place?). I placed the models that we have for the clock and the cave riddle on the spots they are supposed to be. We had a meeting where we discussed what the goals are for our playtesting at MOJO and how to achieve that. Our primary question that we want to clarify through testing is about the interaction with the wolf. Based on this we came up with secondary questions that will hopefully help us to answer that question. Data will be collected by observing, in the best case with thinking aloud, logging and an short interview after the playtesting session. We worked out a scenario that shows hopefully the most potential of the game itself even if it is simplified because of the limited time we have. The scenario includes interaction with NPCs, with the environment, using every ability of the wolf but we have choices the player can make within the game and different consequences. This is how the island currently looks, but there is still much missing depending the scripting and the modeling of the scenario.

I was also working on the controls. First I started with the UI, placing the health indicators and the buttons of the abilities, adding code where the functionality of the abilities can be easy added. And adding the inventory including the button of the UI, so that it opens, when the button is pressed. At first it was a little bit hard to align everything and to have the correct structure so that it also scales correctly with the window resolution, but after a while everything worked out.

Last week, we were working in Unity on another important step in our development - the controls. The result contains conducting dialogues, highlighting interactable objects in the environment, when the player aproaches them, wolf controls, UI, picking up items and the player movement. Only my part was to make the dialogues, I was also partially working on including wolf animations into the controls, interaction with the environment and also preparing the scene for testing with focus group.

Another week passed. We were busy on working on the controls, we were discussing what controls we need at all, how to use specific actions, how the control should work overall, how to arrange things and so on. We came up with some possibilities but we decided not to decide how things should look like for now. We decided to collect opinions of our focus group. We were creating our possibilities on paper by sketching them and cutting them out, so they could be arranged individually without much effort to see how it can look like. We summed up a few questions we want to like the people of the focus group, for example how the abilities should be chosen (keyboard, mouse, buttons,...), how the aiming for the attack should work (highlight target, have an cross hairs,...), do we need an inventory and how should it look like and so on. I made three sessions, 2x2 persons and one time one person, one example result after the interview looks like this: