With more added to Wild Space, I embarked on a journey to playtest the game with others to get some initial feedback on the story and mechanics.
First, I playtested with Richard, a resident of Mirrielees, who played the website in exchange for guidance with CS147L. Richard is a current Junior at Stanford who identifies as a non-furry but does not have any criticisms about the community. He played for the game for a total of 12 minutes before reaching the end (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Playtest one with Richard, a Mirrielees resident
Below are some notes/changes I’ve made after observing his playtest and asking questions:
- Liked the somber music, felt it really added to the emotion of loneliness in space
- Was surprised at how serious the opening scene was
- Thought the game was more immersive with the lights off
- Found the placeholder name “Dingle” really funny
- Change: I modified the placeholder field to be “Dipper” to be space-themed rather than “Dingle”. This should hopefully prevent people from thinking it is silly.
- Thought the furry character was silly and laughed when they showed up
- Change: I spent some time developing a higher-fidelity “slice” of my game by creating more polished character assets (leaving objects the same, as he didn’t have any strong emotion towards those).
- Found certain choices to be “too much”
- Change: I added some other ways to interact with the story, such as a typing-a-journal-entry section and click-on-objects-in-the-scene section. This will ideally make the game less of a “clicking through text boxes” simulator and make the player more engaged to progress the storyline.
Afterwards, I decided to get another viewpoint on my game — so I resorted to going on the internet to have a furry playtest my game. I did this on Discord rather than in-person, and had him share his screen so I could observe what he was doing. Ari identifies as part of the furry community and spent a total of 8 minutes on gameplay, narrating the lines out loud as he went through the game.
Figure 2: Playtest two with Ari, a furry from the internet
After playing with Ari, here are some notes from my observations and questions:
- Liked the overall vibe and the music of the game
- When asked about if he thought the game was linear or branching, he said linear with minor state-change consequences for bad actions (which is not inaccurate)
- However, wanted the music to range based on the environment so it’s not always the default music
- Change: I created a crossfade audio manager, and now the track changes based on the character you talk to. This drastically changed the “vibe” of the game depending on the context, which I liked.
- Wants more reminders of the main character’s personality + resentment of himself
- Change: To show more character insights, I created some scenes that appear each day where the MC personally reflects. This helps the player learn more about their own character before jumping into character dating.
- Wants more official ways to understand his character (extremely similar to above point)
- Change: I added a journaling scene where the character writes his own thoughts down. Because the MC is in space, I don’t want them to be talking, but rather thinking to themself non-verbally. This added to that aesthetic perfectly.
As I write this blog post, the game is undergoing heavy revision. Stay tuned for notes on the next playtest!
