The Fox: A Story of Taming is a choice-driven narrative based on The Little Prince. Played entirely from the Fox’s perspective, players navigate the delicate balance between wild survival and emotional intimacy. The game uses mechanics like bond, wildness, and vulnerability to simulate the emotional risk of taming and being tamed, shown in screenshot 1. Will you guard your heart, or choose to be tamed while risking being left alone? During the in-class playtesting session, I had the opportunity to observe Olu navigating The Fox. Below are key observations and corresponding changes.
1. Single-Choice Nodes
Olu noted that in certain passages, there was only one link available to proceed. This gave them a diminished sense of narrative agency. Even when a scene serves a linear narrative purpose, offering only a single button makes players feel like passive readers rather than active participants. I will revise single-option passages by providing at least two distinct l choices, even both choices in fact lead toward the same scene progression. This preserves player expression without bloating the narrative map unnecessarily.
2. Subversive Choice vs. Intended Empathy Experience: Olu asked: “Can I choose not to be tamed? Can I attack or kill the Little Prince instead?” In interactive fiction, players naturally test the boundary limits of the system to see how much freedom they truly have. However, allowing players to act maliciously (e.g., harming the Prince) directly conflicts with my core design goal: building an experience centered on emotional vulnerability and mutual trust. Therefore, I will stick to the current main storyline – the fox ended up choosing to be tamed.
3. Uncapped Variable Overflows: Olu noticed that stats like wildness, bond, and vulnerability could exceed 100, which create confusion regarding how close they are to reaching specific emotional thresholds or endings. To solve this issue, I asked AI how to set threshold and it suggests adding mathematical boundaries (Math.clamp) to all variable updates so that three variables, bond, wildness, and vulnerability, remain strictly bounded between 0 and 100.
4. UI/UX Bug: Disappearing Restart Button: I notice that The “Restart” button in the left sidebar disappeared because of got pushed off-screen, so Olu asked me whether he can restart the game. Custom CSS formatting in ui-bar and StoryCaption inadvertently prevents players from resetting their play-throughs easily. I will refactor the custom CSS to reduce vertical margins and padding in the left sidebar.
This playtest highlighted the delicate balance between giving players freedom and guiding them toward a specific emotional resonance. Designing for empathy still requires giving players meaningful choices within a clear, intentional emotional framework, rather than infinite willy-nilly choices.
