My second playtest was with a 31 year old father of a 1 year old (my husband). He is a gamer who plays things like League of Legends and Balder’s Gate.
Video can be seen here: Video_2026-10-20_15-25-07.mp4
With narration, he spent 26 minutes playing through the full game. He had a positive reaction to realizing that elements of the story were borrowed from our family’s experience but that is not generalizable.
At 1:00 in he struggled to figure out how to move to the next step so I added whitespace between photos and links. At 1:20 he commented about there being more text than he expected for a narration game. In my opinion it falls within the range of normal for the genre but if the comment is repeated in future playtests I will work on streamlining.
At 2:25 even though he is already a dad (and his sister-in-law swears by the spatula), he chose to take the optional side quest to learn what the spatula is. This suggests that this addition made based on the first playtest was useful.
At 3:08 he comments that there is embedded information meant to teach things (like babies don’t walk until 1 year). Which I choose to interpret as a positive given that he is aware of that element of the class.
At 3:25 he comments that the questions don’t feel like they are resulting in a branching storyline. In part, I think it may be because the passage he was reading did not correctly assign the role so I fixed that. However, the story up to that point was linear in the hopes that slowly adding mechanics would allow easier onboarding and would prevent people from accidentally going off track early on. If similar feedback is given in later play tests I will add branching at the start.
At 4:30, 6:30, 9:40, and 13:40 he started discussing his opinion well beyond the question asked. This is evidence of the type of learning and empathy building that I hope the game provides.
At 15:55 there were two problems. In writing the passage I thought it might be useful to name the coworker. That backfired and was removed. Also though, the player selected the path to help the coworker and then did not follow the correct path. The conditional logic has also been fixed.
Overall it felt very positive but think the biggest question is how I can make answers feel impactful when I explicitly do NOT want many of the choices to be impactful. He commented several times about wanting more visible impact about his choices. It was fascinating that at 12:00 he is excited that there is answer dependence based on his choice to cosleep. The reality of the game is that all 3 choices are reasonable so you get the same feedback regardless as this is an inconsequential choice. At 23:45 he entirely misses the feedback that he missed a photo opportunity. At 26:00 he realizes that he missed two photos but he doesn’t know how he missed them. Optimally this would lead to curiosity about the missed opportunities.
