For P2, I’m developing an interactive fiction involving dating anthropomorphic alien animals after the world has seemingly ended. Today, my game got playtested (see Figure 1)! Here are some of the notes.
Figure 1: The game, in question, being playtested. Wowza!
Changes/considerations that need to be made:
- Some choices at the very beginning are annoying to click through (such as inspecting the room through repeating the same dialogue action multiple times). I will consider more interactive forms of examining objects in the environment, rather than always defaulting to the text box.
- I want to emphasize a feeling of loneliness throughout the start of the game, but it feels like there was too much character interaction. This led to a feeling of being overwhelmed, and I want to increase the moments where the character can personally reflect, to make the distance feel more serious.
- The playtester mentioned that they would probably act more surprised upon suddenly waking up in a spaceship, stranded all on their lonesome. I agree with this take, and want to add more options that allow the player to convey their surprise.
- There was a small visual issue where an obscured character didn’t disappear after another character had appeared.
- Some of the voice blips were pretty loud, and I want to reduce their volume or change them entirely.
Overall, I want to sway my game towards a feeling of loneliness and desperation to find companionship. I don’t think I’ve quite accomplished this yet, and I want to improve on this. My current thoughts are to (1) decrease the amount of interaction that happens at the very start of the game and (2) add more meaningless tasks, to give the player a feeling of boredom (vicariously) and thus be more engaged when they can interact with characters. I’m curious to see how this exaggerated desperation will change players’ thoughts on the dating aesthetic when they meet the characters on more rare occasions.
