My final playtest and the playtest done by the person most in my target audience was with a woman in her 20s who is considering growing her family.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s7Lq63_MmcA_cIDoVbneRN7RYSdgU8Am/view?usp=sharing
Overall the playthrough went extremely smoothly with only minor tweaks.
- At 1:19 she struggled with what to do after selecting “Cool Auntie”. I still want to allow people to select this choice and read the list of tips to support parents but I also want them to know they can play the full game as a parent so I added more explicit language to say just that.
- At 14:11 she pointed out an error in the narrative because I had reordered the passage so I fixed the tense of the narrative.
- At 16:55 she pointed out a ‘glitch’ in the variable injection so I fixed that
Generally she reported that it was fun and laughed throughout (17:35, 18:14) at comments like “Apparently the baby is still in there is insufficient”(5:00). The most interesting part of this playtest for me was that she laughed significantly more and was visibly more engaged when her husband unexpectedly joined her. They laughed at the passage ‘they’ were in (7:36). They also commented and laughed about how the images looked like my family (8:00). While I initially discounted the joy people had in recognizing us this seems to be reflective of some of the topics in the zine reading where the game is more like a youtube video of our son walking just a game version.
This made me wonder if players would have more fun if they were explicitly playing with a partner. I somewhat jokingly considered that this would be a great game to play on a date to determine if there are any significant compromises that need to be discussed before having kids.
In regards to accessing learning and gaining empathy. She clicked on both of the optional learning passages and had a positive reaction to both (3:26, 6:10). Which is positive. It was interesting to see her audibly argue for her position on the consequential questions (3:06) and explain that she recognized some of the answers as correct but struggles to complain (10:36). I think there is some bias in how I wrote the options so that I am leading the player to certain answers but I am happy to see players still choosing honestly. Part of me worried about people not collecting all the photos and not caring but I have come to feel that it is okay and regardless of the choices they make people gain empathy for parents. If someone is enough of a gamer to want to find the perfect path that is available to them but is unnecessary for my target audience.
Here is the updated game link: https://jyauney.itch.io/expect-the-unexpected
I am open to additional feedback but I don’t have any significant questions.
