I playtested with one of my friends, Mark, who is an international student himself and has been in the States for almost 10 years.
Overall impression
Mark said the game reminded him of learning Korean, which is his third language. Being in the foreign-language environment felt like deciphering, almost like solving a puzzle, which is fun.
The 3-second rule:
Mark felt the timed mechanic captures what real conversation is like: the conversation keeps moving whether or not you’re ready, but you still have to understand what’s being said. He saw this as something that could reflect what international students go through.
Q1. Which year did you feel you had the most choice? (Design expects junior year.)
4th year. By then their character was fluent in both languages, and the “back home” scenes were where they felt the most choice.
- Design note: this doesn’t match my intended junior-year peak. Will check back on whether the 4th-year home scenes offer more options than planned, or whether bilingual fluency feels like more freedom to players than the design accounts for.
Q2. When did you most want to say something you couldn’t?
In class, when he was trying to make a point about their understanding of a question or a reading. He felt the moment was meant to show their academic ability, but language became the barrier instead. When he gets stereotypical comments, he wanted to stand up and defend themselves.
Q3. What did it feel like when your own words stopped working at home?
It was difficult. It made him relive learning his third language, Korean.
Follow-up: What feelings were evoked? He really wanted to express themselves in the new language and wanted to talk a lot. He noted that when they were first starting out with a language, they weren’t afraid to say things wrong.
Design feedback
Adding a vocab list might push the game further toward the “deciphering” end, making it feel more like a puzzle than a conversation.
Design notes: is it worth it to have a new vocab /invented language? Will it add more cognitive load that players need to understand what the game is about? Maybe audio of gibberish sounds pairing up with “$%%^&&** ok good *^%#@!%&*” on the screen could work better?
