An elderly couple play some test levels.

This week, I got an elderly couple to play some of the test levels. This proved very valuable, as it brought up the issues and difficulties they have playing games which I hadn’t considered. I had them play 3 levels:

First of all was the bridge level.

I set them up playing one of the bridge levels without any enemy npc’s. Straight away they had trouble controlling the game. They often would get caught on the low railings, and be confused when it wouldn’t let them go forward. The interesting thing about how they played was how they viewed their relationship with what was on screen, the game world as a whole, and themselves. They didn’t appear to mentally place themselves within the game world, and didn’t think of playing the game as controlling themselves or a character going through it. But rather it seemed like they viewed the controls as a way to change what appeared on the screen. As I was explaining the controls, I mentioned that they pressed a key ‘to move yourself forward’, at which point they both looked confused and asked what I meant by that. At one point, one of them had lined up the camera to see a diagonal view of the bridge, but when they needed to turn the camera to the side to negotiate an obstacle in order to cross it, the bridge went of screen, and they immediately said ‘I’m lost’ and tried to get me to sort it out for them. They were panicking a little bit. Other frustrations they had was not being able to move forwards and turn at the same time. Although it’s possible to do that with the games controls, it takes a bit of skill and muscle memory to know where the keys were and to be able to control it confidently enough so that they didn’t fall off the bridges.

Because they had so much trouble controlling the game, only managing to get past two bridges, I don’t think that the materials the bridges were made of played a significant part in where they choose to go. Nonetheless, they both decided to go over the metal bridges only, which were also lined up in a row almost end to end. After first going over a metal bridge, it appears they decided to stick with what they were comfortable with.

The next level they played was the light and dark town.

I changed the level a little by adding in another little experiment. I changed the goal from ‘can you find the cake?’ to ‘can you find the stone statue?’, with the goal written down in the game world on some paper by a dead body.

I had the idea of using similar or related objects as a cookie crumb trial leading them to the stone statue. For this level I placed a statue, but this time made of copper, at a junction leading to the one made of stone. This was done in the hope that players would see the statue, and because of that think that they were on the right path to the statue they had to find.

They got on with this one a lot better than the bridges level, mainly due to it not having a failure state and them getting a bit more used to the controls. However, they didn’t appear to actually enjoy the experience, finding it a bit boring due to its lack of rewards.

The use of the two copper statues ended up working quite well. Both of them were drawn to it and it gave them some motivation to carry on playing, but they felt disappointed when they realised that the statue was copper, not stone. They thought they had won the game and then it dawned on them that they hadn’t.

After finding the first statue, one player carried on down the path it was part of, and the other when the other way, in a 'just in case I miss anything' fashion. The look of the area gave some troubles later on when one of them arrived at the main square at the end.

They had previously noticed the falling yellow leaves near the first statue, and when they saw the falling leaves in the main square, they asked if they were retracing their steps. After a moment they realised that they were in a new area and carried on as normal, but it still gave them a brief moment of confusion, which could of resulted in further confusion if they decided to go back the way they came. Either way, this is someone else who has felt lost when arriving in an area which shares visual features with a previous area.

One final thing to mention was that both players followed the illuminated path and didn’t go near anywhere that was dark. One player asked me in a matter of fact way ‘I take it I need to go towards the lights’, so it looked like their decisions were logical rather than emotional.

And lastly the 3^rd person with a fixed camera cake collecting level.

This was the level that they liked the most. Only the wife of the couple played this level, as the husband at that point had gotten pretty fed up of it and didn’t want to play it. The wife liked how often she got rewarded, and how the game was centred around using skill to control the character on the screen. Every cake picked up felt like an achievement. What I found interesting was how she reacted to her failures in controlling the character. In the other levels, if they bumped into something, got lost or fell off something, they would get a little down and frustrated, in a kind of sombre rather than angry way. But when controlling a character, instead of feeling bad about herself, she got frustrated at the character. She kept on saying ‘you stupid man’ when things weren’t going her way.

Again, she followed the lit areas and didn’t attempt to go down any of the darker paths. I ended up having to finish the game for her, and when I showed her the dark foresty areas, she didn’t seem too surprised, so it looks like she didn’t go down those paths due to some emotional connection with the dark or because of disinterest.

I’m going to carry on experimenting with the idea of object and environmental semantics, using similar objects to what players need to find to point them in the right direction. However, I’m also going to be looking into different control schemes. One which is simple but relatable enough for players like the elderly couple to pick up easily. I’m going to think about how I could add it some kind of ‘touch’ element to the controls as well.

Sandy Level

Over the past few weeks, I made a puzzle level using the ideas and potential conclusions that have come up with the few experiments I did during the last semester. I did this to further test them, but also as a way for me to practice level design in general, as the majority of the work I’ve been doing so far has been more to do with creating a virtual environment than a set of rules. The level is essentially a couple of puzzles, where you use buckets of sand to turn giant wheels that will open doors, with a main, harder puzzle proceeding an introduction puzzle.

Players start off in a large open, agoraphobic area. I wanted to practice guiding players to certain areas using interesting objects and composition. There is a ‘cookie crum’ trial of wooden man-made structures leading towards the cave, and the rocks on the outside are placed so that if a player follows it, it will lead them to the levels entrance. The fog is heavy enough so that from the start position players can’t see the entrance, but they can a little bit of the rock. I wanted to see what direction they would go in if they didn’t have any immediate stimuli.

This first room is the introduction puzzle, which shows the player a wheel being turned around by sand, another wheel with a container above it and a valve like wheel beside it, and a bucket. I’ve used some of the same methods I used when working on Rise of the Triad, with the most important objects in the room coloured to contrast with the rest of the room’s palette, namely the container being a bright turquoise, and the stone door (of which this room's goal is to go through) being a dark blue. The bucket the player needs to pick up doesn’t have any highlighting on it and isn’t a vivid colour. I wanted to see if the object being in this specific situation gave it the affordance of being usable.

This next corridor is testing a few things I’ve looked at before in the previous test. The waterfall is there to see if it affords any sort of danger or if players think it to be impassable. There are two bridges in the room, one has a hole in it and the other doesn’t, and neither of which look like they are leading anywhere. I wanted to see which bridges players’ are put off from crossing.

One of the things I found from previous playtests was the idea that new players could find the idea of going backwards to feel regressive and unsatisfying. The fact that this idea came from watching a racing game fan playing a horror game meant that I really needed to look into it more. With the main puzzle, players are required to pick up multiple piles of sand and share them across two containers to exit and thus progress. In total there are 4 piles, but players can get away with using 3. 3 of the piles are in this room, but the forth pile is located back in the previous puzzle room, and players can open a side door to quickly get back to it. 

If backtracking was seen as regressive or otherwise undesirable, players wouldn’t collect the 4^th pile even after opening the door, and I imagine at best they would open the door to the previous room, and then go back after realising that they had been in there before.

After the player has gone through that room, they travel across an outside area. Again, this was to see if anyone felt that they were somehow regressing, like what was seen with my Dad playing Silent Hill Shattered Memories.

In the final area, there is this treasure. I wanted to see what the players reaction to this floating cube would be, and whether or not they try to pick it up. The wall behind the cube is also different from the other walls, and I wanted to see if players felt that it was somehow significant because of it.

This time, I decided to experiment with only using keyboard control to make it simpler to control. Whenever the player is required to or is aided by looking down, a camera animation takes care of it for them. I want to see if new players find this helpful and ends up helping them make their way through the level, or if they find it frustrating as if it was taking control away from them.

***

At the recent open day at UCLan, I had the opportunity to have some fresh faces playtest the level, who were a mix between younger more experienced players, and their parents or friends who were less experienced, which helped in seeing if there were any differences in how they played. Beforehand, I had an inexperienced family member play it as well. In total 7 people have played the level.

In terms of play experience for them, it was an outright failure. The majority of players didn’t get past the first room, either from failing to solve the puzzle, or by not reaching the room in the first place. Two players managed to complete it.

The first couple of players at UCLan, who were pretty experienced, as well as the previously mentioned inexperienced family member, all turned around at the start and climbed up the sand dune behind them. The inexperienced player said he did it to get to a high point to survey his surroundings. The two experienced players didn’t mention this explicitly, but they followed the same actions of getting to higher ground. This looks like it might be a natural behaviour shared between all players; when lost with no visible landmarks to see, they will reach higher ground to find something. I’ll test this out in a later level.

All three of these players did manage to find something in the endless desert eventually. The experienced players ended up at the levels end, and the inexperienced player managed to get around again and went to the level's entrance. Because of the low test base I’m not going to read any differences between new and experienced players.

After these three played the game, I decided to reduce the density of the fog at the start so that players would see the entrance of the cave more clearly, so I would have a chance at seeing how they solve the puzzles. All of the players afterwards ended up going into the cave, but they still wanted to explore what was behind and around them.

What was interesting about this opening area is how the inexperienced players processed the objects in it.

Both inexperienced players thought that they could climb up these scaffolds, which were just props that I was using as platforms elsewhere in the level. The experienced players did look at them but didn’t try to interact with them. From this it would seem that these new players felt that they afforded climbing, but experienced players didn't. The experienced used their previous game experienced to deduce that they were static, but the inexperienced what to interact with the game world in the same way they would reality.

This goes against previous tests that showed that players didn’t take into account what material and structural state certain bridges were made of before making a decision about crossing them. In that test, players (albeit mostly experienced) didn't interact what the game world in a realistic manner. It might be that new players will attempt to interact with a realistic environment with realistic actions, or maybe they were attempting to reach higher ground to see further. I’m going to get some inexperienced players to play the previous ‘Bridges and Material Semantics’ level to see if they have the same reaction that experienced players do.

The few players that reached this first room ran into some trouble. They didn’t know what they could interact with, and some of the things that they thought they could interact with turned out to be static. For the 2 inexperienced players, one of them picked up the bucket straight away and then asked if they could put it down again, and the other player didn’t understand that the bucket could be picked up. I think that this might have been because this had attempted to interact with the scaffolding outside by pressing the interact button. I had told the player about the button just after they started, which probably influenced them to use it somewhere. I hadn’t told the player who had picked up the bucket about the button until they asked me how to pick it up. It seems that the failed attempt at interactivity had coloured their perception of the game world, and wasn’t inspired to pick up the bucket as they felt that they wouldn’t be able to use it.

Of those who did pick the bucket up, a popular thing to do was to try to hold the bucket under the sand that turns the wheel. They knew, or at least wanted, to collect sand in the bucket, and the method they decided to use made perfect sense, I just didn’t let them. This was a pure design flaw on my part.

What was successful however, was that many players, possibly after picking up the bucket and definitely after picking up the sand, managed to assert that they needed to put the sand in the bucket and rotate the valve wheel. This would have been easier for the players to understand if they could look up however, as then they would of been easily able to see the connection between the valve and the container. All of the experienced players at some point resorted to using the laptops touchpad to look up at some point. Inexperienced players didn’t do this, most likely because they didn’t know they could do it. As I was watching them play I did overhear both of them mutter something about wanting to look up. It looks like the control scheme didn’t give players the freedom they wanted.

As only two players managed to get past the first room, an inexperienced one and experienced one, I’m not going to draw many conclusions. But, both players didn’t think they could pass under the waterfall, one attempted to cross over the first bridge after seeing it (and succeeding by going over the rope holding it together), and both players tried to walk over the second bridge, even though there wasn’t anything to go over to. This is a nice little back up of the idea that bridges afford crossing over. Even though both players didn’t try to go through the waterfall, I’m not going to assert that this is representative of all natural world stimuli. As I was watching people play, I felt that the waterfall made much more of a barrier then I anticipated. So, as with the broken bridges in the ‘Camera anims’ test, I’m going to say that it is more to do with geometry than it is materials.

These two players also had some trouble with the second room, they didn’t realise straight away that the room used a double door, only doing so when they placed some sand in one container and then being shocked when they realised that they couldn’t get out so easily. I quite liked having that as players gave strong reaction. However I’m sure that not all players would consider that moment to be fun.

Neither player collected the 4^th pile of sand from the first room. Both players opened the door to the room, however after realising what it was, they turned around. Again more testing is needed, but this is more evidence of backtracking feeling regressive for players, and thus something that they naturally don’t want to do, regardless of how much experience they have.

Even though the wheels in either room were coloured differently, the inexperienced player felt that they had been in the second room before when they approached it. This wasn’t a problem for the experienced player. I would like to get some more inexperienced players to playtest to see if this is a behaviour that is shared amongst the inexperienced or is just something that this individual player does.

The final area played very smoothly, and players did what I expected. 2 of the 7 players didn’t reach this area, and those that did reacted in more or less the same way. Players would walk across the planks, enter the building, successfully pick up the cube and then turn around. All of the players who got that far hesitated  little after picking up the cube, wondering what they needed to before doing the only thing they could do, which was leave the area. If I had placed a locked door like object in the previous cave area and replaced the cube with a key, I’m sure there would have been less hesitation.

The 2 players who turned around at the very start of the level manage to find this area, and by jumping managed to climb on to the scaffold and make it to the building. One of these players starting going down the cave before turning around, and the other didn’t really seem to notice it.

So far, I think I’ve arrived at two big conclusions.

Firstly…

From what I saw with the testing, it seems that if the player doesn’t have any goal, and no previous knowledge of a realistic looking game world or any other similar worlds, they will approach it in a realistic manner. However, there actions are based on the sensual information that they are given. In the case of the wooden and metal bridges test, I think that players reacted the same to both bridges because the strength materials is something that is felt rather than seen or heard. You feel how hard metal and wood are. You can’t see hardness.

This has given me some strange ideas of how to incorporate touch into video games. Perhaps I could look into haptic feedback, or maybe try to come up with some sort of cross between video games and theatrical performance. In the light vs dark test, were players were split 50:50 on whether they travelled down a light path or a dark path, but I doubt it would be the same if someone was standing directly behind them breathing down their necks when they were in the dark. Of course, a theatre troupe isn’t something that you can pack away at home and take out when you’re bored, so I’m going to think of ways that can do similar things but just with what the computer can do.

There are plenty of examples of games which try to bring the game out of the computer and into reality, (such as Deep Sea, where you wear a paper mache mask, and any games which use a combination of the Oculus Rift and the Virtuix Omni) but all of the experiences that I know of do these to ‘increase immersion’ or simply because there creators thought it would be cool.

I’m going to try to propose that things like these could be used to increase the effectiveness of navigational cues for newer players, by making certain stimuli feel more realistic, and thus remove any ambiguity about what said stimuli does in the game world. And I’m going to try to do it without using anything fancier than a mouse and keyboard. And probably a touch screen.

Secondly…

The one big thing I am learning is that all players think differently.

Something I would like to investigate later on is using this test-like level design in order to generally determine a players personality. By monitoring what options they take, the level design could on the fly be adapted so that the guidance that is used suited the player. Something that I mentioned right at the start of this semester was a desire to use O.C.E.A.N. personality tests on players, but due to said tests taking at least 15 minutes to complete, it didn't seem practical to do them.