My playtester was a 22-year old female CS Coterm student. She played the game twice, effectively deciding to do nothing the first round and publishing damning evidence about Cerebra (the company the story is about) to bring it down publicly in the second round. She said she felt more decisive in the second round because she actually ended up doing something but not so much in her first round, which just ends abruptly (3:44 in the video). I realized the problem might have been further back with the different choices the player can make leading to the different endings. I had wanted the “do nothing” option to still feel like a decision since the player chooses to prioritize their work/chosen family above what is probably best for society, but it seems that didn’t come through. To rectify this, I actually did my next version out of ChoiceScript (as a flow chart in Figma) so that I could properly map out the branches before implementing it digitally. I had initially thought that I was ready for digital implementation, but I’m realizing some more designing needs to be done before I do that.
She liked that each choice limits future options, meaning that decisions are consequential. She also mentioned she liked the writing style—except it was a lot more fleshed out at the beginning/more immersive but later, the pacing picked up and it was harder to envision oneself in the story. I also noticed that the fast pacing led to some necessary explanations being left out (e.g. 3:15 on the video). The reason for the fast pacing was that I was roughly testing out the story idea, but I realized in hindsight that it was hard to truly evaluate the story without having the immersion throughout the story. In my next version, I have fleshed out later scenes more.
I also observed as I was watching her play that there was a lot of reading without being broken up by choices early on (0:12 on the video), so I had some more branching/choices to break up the text so that the character could feel like they were making decisions instead of just decisions being made for them. These would be smaller choices given that the character has to communicate one way or another where they work to the person who’ll tell them about the bad stuff at their company, so the story direction won’t change much, but I still want the player to have some agency, so I’m actually bringing back stats.
Finally, I realized that I didn’t properly integrate the flashback in (5:28 in the video), so when I switch back to digital, I will make sure I properly integrate it.
I have the following questions:
- I was considering making stats internal (i.e. not visible to the user) so that they can’t try to intentionally engineer more confidence, better relationships with certain characters, etc. What do you think?
- How should I go about making sure I limit future options enough as players make choices (to make them consequential) versus not limiting them too much to the point where players don’t get access to choices they didn’t even know they were eliminating with a decision? Although perhaps the latter scenario is just a reflection of real life?
- When I have the character click an option that is like “Ask them about x,” should the next scene actually show them asking it or just assume it has been asked already? I think I have a mix of showing it versus assuming it happens, doing the former when it’s a specific way it’s being done/I want to add description and doing the latter when it would effectively be repeating the text of the choice.
