During class, I got to playtest with two individuals. For the first playtests, I mainly had core plot elements as narrative/options for the player to explore, and they got through the experience within the allotted time, while seemingly quite invested in the plot. They showed some lapse in absorption of what made my world a dystopia (since the player’s character initially believes their world to be utopic), so I decided to add more elements of the player discovering what’s wrong explicitly (without concern for narrative implementation at this point). Based off of this interaction, I would like to add more narrative to these plot points to make them flow more smoothly, and not feel like heart attack after heart attack of action.
After implementing some more mundane narrative elements, primarily at the beginning when the player is still in the “normal life” phase of the story, the second playtester barely got to the main plot point that inspires the rest of the journey. (They partially attributed this to the paper fidelity with external explanations, versus reading from text alone). They asked for a quick rundown of more details and were interested, but stated that they think some of the mundane tasks may not be as necessary, to get to the action faster; I hope to continue playtesting to find a middle point between “too fast; overwhelming,” and “too slow; underwhelming” through further interaction. This playtester also stated that they wished they had “kinder” options to choose—although the character begins as a “hardened” police chief, they thought that allowing the player more empathetic choices should be part of their character journey, and I agreed.
From these observations, I plan to keep experimenting with my narrative pacing, while also exploring a wider breadth of choices which allows the player to project more of their own personality upon their character.
