Testing

This week I started properly on testing the maps that I had made. On Friday (5/10/12) I rounded up a group from the university and got them to play the desert like level.

Some things I noticed:

Everyone went over the bridge. Everyone. Even though they didn’t need to and could just walk around the edge of the hole. This may be because the other route wasn’t visible enough, and the cartoony style the bridge has made it stand out more against the rest of the level, but it makes a good argument for the theory that people can’t help but go over bridges. I will make a map which will test this further, involving the player going over different bridges, making sure the visual style is consistent and that all possible routes the player could use are easily noticeable.

The majority of the playtesters went through the tunnel. And if they didn’t go through the tunnel they down the left path. It did seem that the players were viewing the section as three separate paths instead of a wide are with a tunnel running through it.

Hardly any of the player went through this middle tunnel. They instead seemed dead set on going over to the bridge in order to cross it, which might have been due to its cartoony-ness.

There was one case however, where a player didn’t go through the first tunnel but looked through it twice, once through the entrance and once through the exit, and then went underneath the middle tunnel. To me, it seems that they didn’t go through the first tunnel because there was no need to; they already knew what was through it and that there was nothing inside of it. I’m not sure why they decided to go through the middle tunnel; maybe there was a part of them that wanted to go through a tunnel like structure but they felt that they missed their chance by not going through the first one? Or maybe they were just curious as to what was over there.

After this, I picked out some things I wanted to look into for the next map:

- Are people attracted to mystery? (I don’t think it was something I looked into enough with this map)

- Will more people go through tunnel if they couldn’t see where it went? (Although this links into mystery)

- Are stand out visuals attractive..?

- ...or are semantics more attractive?

And I came up with this

This section is here to see if players will go into the tunnel. Originally the inside had a blue light, but it was changed to be similar to the rest of the level to make sure that it wasn’t the difference in the lighting colour that was attracting people to it.

This is the ‘mysterious’ section.

And this is the semantics vs stand out visuals section.

So far, I’ve had one person playtest the level.

Some things I noticed:

The first thing the player did was look behind the crates. I placed them there for decoration because the artistic side of me thought that the room was looking bare. He problem is that the player has now gone looking for something and has become unsatisfied that nothing was there. I’m going to have to be careful in the future about moments like this. Perhaps it could also mean that guiding players successfully will require some areas of the level to look boring and plain to make players disinterested in them.

The player went into the tunnel after a bit of thought, further showing that people associate tunnels with going through them.

The 'mystery' section worked well, the player went for it.

The player also went over the bridge without thinking too much about it. However I’m not convinced that it was entirely the bridge that caused the player to go over it. The green light from the sludge under it might have had something to do with it as well. I’ll try a different version of the map with the sludge replaced with water and the green light turned off.

The player had no way of knowing that the valve was interactable. It’s pretty typical for a game to have some sort of highlight around interactive items, but as this project is all about making things more subtle I’m going to try something different.