Do our tasks and mechanics facilitate efficient communication with the other player?
This is an important question to ask because Meltdown creates an high stress environment that hinges on player’s ability to communicate. We want to provide intentional struggle to communicate, but not to the point where it’s frustrating for players. I think a good prototype to test this could be to create cards representing buttons/dials/levers in the game and provide tasks, and note how the players are communicating between each other. I think this will give us a clear insight into whether or not a mechanic is too frustrating / unintentionally unclear.
Is our ‘sudden emergency’ mechanic sensible and fun?
Meltdown’s concept intentionally creates high pressure communication by introducing different tasks, time limits, consequences, and even sudden ‘emergency’ tasks. However, there is a fine line between being stressful but fun, and being overwhelming and confusing. To test this, we can use a similar low fidelity setup using cards, and slowly increase the amount of tasks / priorities / sudden emergencies through the course of a few levels. By noting player reactions, abilities, and communication, we will be able to determine what level of interruptions contributes towards the purpose of the game, and when it begins to detract from player enjoyment.
Is having different control panels as the difficulty increases too confusing?
One of our features is that in different levels, the board/screen that the player interacts with changes to different mechanics, giving the illusion of the player fixing multiple control panels at a nuclear reactor. However, as the game increases in difficulty, I wonder if it may be too overwhelming to learn a new set of mechanics each round on top of time limits/task difficulty increasing. We can test this by prototyping different boards for players to use across different rounds of increasing difficulty, and observe how much of a barrier learning new controls is.
