We ran through our mobile prototype with Dave C today in preparation for our playtesting sessions with teens on Saturday November 3.
He told us he wished he could make decisions, and that he was confused for the first several scenes about what he was doing and why. Not understanding what’s happening is a problem because it takes the player away from what they should be focusing on, which is learning a tangible lesson relevant to their future abilities as a driver.
We currently have text, images, and audio as feedback for the player’s interactions. Dave said he had a hard time understanding what kind of interaction was going to happen when he clicked.
The story content and manual content are rather jarring next to one another. The purpose and meaning of what the player is doing needs to be clear right away. There isn’t enough clarity initially to know what to do to move forward or what to expect next. He said the transition between the parent’s crying and the car crash was very unexpected and didn’t make sense to him. We are now planning to move the car crash scene all the way to the end, and to have it be a reflection of the decisions the player has made throughout the game.
In some scenes, he was randomly clicking to figure out what is interactable and how to move on. We are adding particles on the interactable objects for the play test tomorrow so that players are never guessing about what is interactable.
Dave said it feels like a very slow graphic novel. He doesn’t feel involved (decision making, what is my purpose) in the experience and found it confusing. The iteration of the story and timeline will need to continue to focus to address these weaknesses. He said if we can walk players through a meaningful decision making process that simulates an event a driver would easily imagine they could encounter, we can give the players more confidence with relevant but more complex social decision making skills (dealing with friends in your car, your behavior changes when you are with your friends, why does it change, how does it change, how can you combat the temptation to do the wrong thing). We want the player’s actions to generate an experience for them that is transferable. Tomorrow, the teens will be able to help us focus on answering these questions through our experience.