Thesis Week 6/7/8
Playtesting & Evaluative Research!
For my final weeks on my time for my thesis, I went around and got as many people to try my game as possible and focus on my paper. I posted my project to a couple forums and websites but didn’t get any responses. I found that it was difficult to get people who were tech savvy enough as well as willing to go through the effort of downloading my project, playing it, and giving me constructive criticism in the sea of other developers. I found that the best way to get feedback was to physically bring my headset to someone to have them test it for me. Without the global benefit of the internet, a lot of my testers were my classmates, friends, and family. A way to get strangers to try out my game that I went to every week after getting my game ready was Playtest Thursday with the NYU Game Center. At the event, it was actually a lot more disappointing that I thought, it was a very sparse showing of people and about ninety percent of the participants were students trying to get others to play their game rather than players. I can’t say I was too impressed with any of the projects I played but I did find that I had to play other games if I wanted others to play my game. The feed back was good from some people but not super helpful from others. What was useful though was just observing how testers reacted while playing and how they interacted with what happened in the game. I did hit all of my goals where it was a very challenging game, it didn’t cause any motion sickness and it got a super huge wow factor to it. Making sure no one felt nauseous was important to me since I’m personally someone who suffers from this with VR and especially important for this project since I had to constantly develop and test it. Being able to carry it around and test it without a computer or much setup was a big one for me as well but was a pretty tough challenge to get working mobile. I found that getting people to read directions or listen to me was very tough, I now know that it’s important to force people to learn the game through tutorial levels to protect the players from themselves. I ended up telling people directly how to move around and how to engage the bigger gun, when they did get it going though, they were super excited. In terms of difficulty, some people quickly got overwhelmed while others got very into it and wanted to try a few times so it was very polarizing. The overall goal was very successful though, people got engaged and immersed almost instantly. For the future I would also need to add additional levels of difficulty between easy and hard modes as the spectrum of players was very wide and I need to scale to that. For now I had an overwhelming amount of people not say that the game was easy, but I also wonder if they would soon find it easy if they had more time with the game or had easier levels to slowly get used to the experience. The feedback I got was very useful insight on how to improve my designs for the future as well as improve this one. To finish the thesis, I just need to strengthen my paper based on my thesis defense feedback and I will have to pick and choose which technical improvements I want to implement into my project and focus on before the showcase.
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while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
print 'Iteration ' + i;
deck.shuffle();
i++;
}
print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';