Playtest Report

Typing of the Day

Playtest report

Playtesting session #1:

This playtest was performed with members from the University of Toronto Game Development Club through the Parsec Application and the alpha release version of our game was presented to them, where many models and visual elements such as UI and comics from the scene transitions were still very rough so the focus was on the core gameplay and mechanics. The members of the University of Toronto Game Development Club had an abundance of game development experience and gave us many insightful questions and advice which we ourselves did not even think about!

The feedback we received mostly revolved around the gameplay mechanics and ludology of our game, as well as concerns about visual or audio feedback on player inputs:

• There were concerns raised about how a player could be able to better notice that they were succeeding or failing typing prompts apart from the health bar in our UI decreasing and the letters turning green, as sometimes during the QTE typing prompts where players are extremely focused on the next group of letters to type they are not easily able to gauge if the previous letters were typed at all.
  • We agreed with this concern and added sound effects that gave a clearer indication of whether a player typed a letter and if they passed or failed a typing prompt.
  • We agreed with this piece of feedback and looked to include audio feedback and further visual feedback through sounds playing for failing/passing a typing prompt

• There were also concerns raised about the difficulty of the stage, as some players found the prompts easy whereas others found it too hard.
  • We agreed with this sentiment and will add a difficulty option to our game that will determine how fast the QTE typing events will count down.

• We noticed that the control was not intuitive for some players, as they were trying to control the movement of the character with “WASD”. We were also notified that it was not intuitive in some scenarios about how players should correct their mistakes, and there was also a bug where when typing spacebars it would incorrectly cause the next letter to be typed to light up green, confusing our play-testers.
  • This was a major concern that we as the developers overlooked as it was very obvious to us how we wanted to type or play the game, but to a new player, it is very unintuitive. We fixed the bug that was present during the playtesting session (by introducing a whitespace character to represent spaces) and also modified our tutorial level to make our game mechanics more clear such as adding a "Call of Duty" mission introduction style text at the bottom left of the tutorial level that gives a brief explanation on how the game is going to be played.

• The final major feedback point we received was that players should have more freedom and control over how long the cutscenes last as some play-testers felt that the cutscene transitions were either too short or too long!
  • We also took this to heart and made the cutscene transitions long by default and also added the option to skip the cutscenes by pressing enter if the player felt that they digested the cutscene enough already.

Playtesting session #2:

This playtest was performed with Ubisoft Employees in their discord and additional students from other groups in CSC404, again through the Parsec Application and the alpha release version of our game (with updates from the first playtest) was presented to them. The members of the Ubisoft discord had an extraordinary amount of experience that was evident in the level of the feedback we received and they helped us adjust our build so that going into the beta release our game looked far more polished than before!

• - One major concern that almost all play-testers raised to us was the risk that our game could be too monotonous so we needed to find a way to make each replay different somehow, with suggestions including choosing different words from a "word bank" each time to give an unexpected element to each playthrough and also having each thing you type cause a different effect on the environment.
  • This part of the feedback was the most debated amongst our team, as there were many good ideas and workarounds to this problem, and we identified that the "word bank" strategy could cause another layer of difficulty as it is hard to gauge the "difficulty" of words and phrases (This turned into an even more interesting discussion on what makes words and phrases difficult, such as the distance between two arbitrary letters on the keyboard), and our OCAD students had concerns about having the same prompt cause a different effect on the environment since it would prove to be a lot of additional work, so we settled on implementing a "score" system where the player receives a score for every single correct keystroke and deducts score for every incorrect keystroke. Additionally, we were also considering adding multipliers to the score or "grade" rankings based on consistently correct keystrokes.

• We were recommended to make the HP bar decrements more "variable" depending on the performance of the player on each typing prompt, with suggestions on potential ways to increase the HP of the player in a level through consistent good performance.
  • This was a good suggestion but in the end, we decided against it as our levels do not take a long amount of time to complete so restarting a level made much more sense rather than regaining HP.
• Another important feedback we received was that apart from failing prompts decreasing the HP of our player, the play-testers recommended having even more additional visual feedback depending on the context of the situation, such as stumbling in the parkour level of the screen flashing red in the zombie shooting level.
  • Currently, we have implemented the score decrement system to have more visual feedback in our game, and will look to add the suggested features if we have time too!
• We also received some positive feedback about the level design and music! The play-testers liked the BGM and the level design of our parkour and shooting stages, while also correctly identifying "Typing of the Dead" as our primary inspiration.
• Finally, another criticism we received is that certain scene transitions were too "snappy" such as the comics immediately popping into view rather than a more gradual and visually appealing fade.
  • We agreed with this heavily and have since made many UI transitions much more smooth and more gradual!

Final Playtest (Beta Release):

In this playtest, we had members of the CSC404 staff playtest our game in front of the course instructors, other staff members, and students.

At this point, our game was mostly completed as it is in the Beta release stage, with only a few models and comics missing from the final game as well as some UI and gameplay quality of life changes. We will make no further mechanical changes as both the players and playtesters felt that the game was in a good spot. That being said, there were still criticisms that we had to take into account:

• The first criticism that we received was that the audio played during the gameplay was not very clear, that is to say, that a playtester felt that it was difficult to differentiate between the in-game BGM and the sound FX that would play during typing prompts such as the sound FX that results when typing a letter correctly or incorrectly.
  • We worked around this problem by making the BGM slightly quieter and the important sound FX louder in order to be able to hear the important SFX easier, we also reduced the variation of negative SFX to make the player more well adjusted to the sound cues that they could use to know if a typing prompt was failed.
• The second criticism we received was that the choices of words that we select for the typing prompts can be altered to fit the context some more. In the second level, the playtesters felt that the words were fitting but in the final level there were some words that they felt were not related at all to the typing prompts given.
  • This was a criticism that we needed to discuss as a team for a bit since we felt that having words that were unrelated to the typing prompt was a part of the challenge in typing it correctly; ultimately we decided that the criticism made more sense than our way of thinking especially since unrelated words could add to frustration in the experience of the player so we decided to make the words that were possible to appear on prompts much more related to the prompt itself (via per-typing event word banks).
• The final major criticism was that the visuals in level 1 (the level with the spooky scary skeletons) are very cluttered, causing fps drops and more importantly, distracts from the typing prompts. They said that in particular, the graffiti and effects on the walls that line the path that the character takes are very distracting and will contrast the typing prompts at times.
  • We are currently working to fix this problem by using our own models that are much clearer and not as cluttered, and additionally, we will remove the wall models that only serve as eye candy (the walls that have too much writing or details on them). Additionally, we will make the fonts and contrast of the typing prompt more distinct to allow players to distinguish between letters and the background better.

Questions/Survey:

This is the link to our questions and survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wA5_vBNBh_CHz5tm9FsO5seHDy8HogX0TvrfUHEuFQM

We made sure to make most of the questions short as we did not want to take up a huge portion of the playtester’s time, especially since there could be multiple playtesters. We also included a good mix of open-ended and non-open-ended questions that helped us guide the direction of our game.

In our responses, we gathered that most of our playtesters found the game somewhat easy, so we increased the average difficulty of our game and also included a difficulty option for players to set in case the base difficulty was too hard, as there were some playtesters who found it relatively hard.

We also received suggestions in the survey that made its way to the Beta release such as randomizing words, having more audio feedback on typing and a difficulty slider.

We also received feedback in the survey about opinions on the current state of our game; the majority of playtesters felt that the current visuals, sound effects, and gameplay were great, which was great to hear! However, most players indicated they would NOT want to replay our game again which made us focus on the replayability issue that the earlier versions of our game presented.

Testing Procedure:

As our game was too large to upload onto itch.io, we had players use the Parsec application to take control of our game through Kevin’s computer. Especially at the earlier stages of our game, we wanted to be sure exactly how intuitive our game was to play, so at those points, we did not give any further instructions on what to do after the game started. This gave us very important information; for example, some players thought that the game was supposed to be a free traversal type of game rather than scripted movement, so we fixed that by adding a “mission prompt” style text that shows at the tutorial level indicating what the player’s goal is and it also implied that movement was not up to the player. We also had some players indicate to us that they were not sure if they had to type the spaces as well inside phrases, so we added a small dot in between words to indicate to players they needed to type the spaces as well. Another major issue that players found was that they did know if they needed to backspace or not after making a mistake, so we tried to make it more clear to the player that they did not need to backspace by adding a score functionality that would decrease for every incorrect letter type. 

Once the initial confusion was sorted out and playtesters seemed to have a good idea of how the game was to be played as well as how the game was going to flow, our testing procedure changed to giving playtesters more rigid instructions throughout the playthrough and we also expressed that they should indicate to us if they saw anything that was noteworthy; whether it be something good or something bad. We would always have someone recording the feedback of the player while they were playing through it so we would have an even stronger reference to how we should fix any problems that play-testers encounter. 

Finally, in order to prevent bias as much as we could since we as the devs know all the mechanics of the game and what is going to happen next at any point of the game, we made sure not to say more than we needed to when the playtesters were playing, as we wanted the playtester to simulate someone who is playing this game for the first time as much as possible.