The Zoom recording of the playtest can be found here:
https://stanford.zoom.us/rec/share/TlG72SPr9jG1r7rrKCsIOyI2_fVQ_EHnn171Sra72KYqGlmBrhp74tU28FxINHrn.eRxeMsegcuNsgSw6?from=hub
Passcode: @Cg3=L94
The game build/executable can be found here (use your Stanford email): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Eax3GiSxpd3jMGILhChcv3PYXs97_g16?usp=sharing
In this playtest, Lucas and Noe played my game. I forgot to explicitly ask about whether they’re in my target audience, but I know that the both of them have played a decent number of narrative games in the past. In the future I’ll add a questionnaire to ask what games people play, and whether they’ve played a visual novel / RenPy game before.
Last playtest, my game only had the introduction where you exist as a formless being, then become a goat. Since the last playtest, I finished the scaffolding for the rest of the story, where you embody humans and tackle the village’s scarcity problem. I still have placeholder graphics for the backgrounds and no ending CGs yet.
I noted mainly the constructive feedback I will look to use in the future:
- I should make sure narration uses a consistent pronoun. There’s an artifact of the intro that has the choice “Who am I?”, which contrasts against the second person narrative in the story.
- The story has a lot of parts that build small amounts of empathy, and it would be great if at least some of those parts were fleshed out more to develop more substantial empathy.
- The player can develop empathy via struggling through something in the game. In the Reeve path they chose, they felt like the struggle wasn’t so bad to cause grief.
- They expressed that a grim aesthetic would be more well-complimented by harsher consequences in the world.
- Empathy for NPCs can be felt clearly if we are explicitly told about the negative consequences that do happen in addition to implying consequences from them not being in the story.
- Cryptic writing sometimes (self-note: this is intentional, but I think it could be refined so players can get the gist. I think I will test this again after some graphics to see if seeing the graphics allows people to connect the text they read with visuals)
- The goat part is interesting, but making it longer would relatively impact the length of the game in a way that doesn’t focus on the main conflict of the game.
- The final year has dialogue that is delivered in paragraphs that are too long. Players tend to read the first sentence and move on with the general gist. The writing in the beginning was fairly good and they got the idea, so I should edit the final year dialogue to match.
- Few mistakes in the text need to be fixed, like the tall woman being “under my hand” when you are the small boy. Or the graphics need to update (e.g. he is taller now).
- There should be tension in the ending in the climax, even in the good ending. Because otherwise there isn’t much of a payoff if the player gets the good ending.
Open Questions / Notes for advice/feedback:
- I’ll have to use image generation to fill in the graphics because of the time constraint. But if the images don’t match the descriptions as well, I should just edit the descriptions because it’s easier to match the image than to generate a new image.
- I wonder if it’s right to compact the narration descriptions of the scene. I feel like even though the visuals are there, it’s good for the user to connect visuals with text. And the narration allows me, in my premise, to describe how the player’s character perceives/interprets something. And players can always skip through the text if needed.
