Lead Designer Blogpost 2

Hey everyone! My name is Cody Philbrook. I am the lead designer for Menacing Mansion. It's been about 2 weeks since my last post and the production for my game has been progressing smoothly. If you would like to check out what the team has been up to these past couple of weeks, please click herefor my producer, Justin Amian’s blog. I wanted to start this blog off by talking about our super successful first prototype launch and the playtest results.

 For this prototype we were able to get a lot of traction on Itch.io as well as getting a lot of our players to fill out our feedback forum. During this playtest we were able to successfully get 25 playtesters. While the feedback we got was insightful there were a few areas where we can improve on the questions to yield better data. Moving forward in order to get valuable information from our feedback forums we will create questions that are more targeted to specific systems in the game.That said, let's talk about the results and the questions.

For the first prototype I wanted to ensure that the core components of the game felt right to the player; the player height, player speed, the aesthetic of the room, its relative size and our ability to draw the players attention and potentially scare them.

 Working with my team I decided that Paschal's height will be about 5.5 ft or 1.6764 M. Using these parameters allowed us to gauge the players opinion of the size of the room and whether or not the room was easy to move around in and navigate. Originally I decided that rooms would be 20X20 meters, but upon closer inspection and testing in unity the scale was too large and I decided to reduce the size to 15 x 15 meters. This ensured that the player had a more intimate experience in the rooms and made it easier for my team to populate the room without the room having empty space.

We decided to ask the players if they thought the space was easy to navigate through our feedback forum. With feedback we were able to determine that the scaled down room didn’t make the player feel like the room became difficult to move around in. Of the playtesters 76% didn’t feel that the room was too small of a space.

For the next question we wanted to know if the player movement speed was “too fast”.

The design I have envisioned for the player is that the player will navigate the mansion with a slow and cautious cadence. But in future builds I plan to have a limited sprint feature implemented so players can escape from monsters. We need to ensure that the speed at which the player moves while walking isn’t too fast. We discovered that 68% of players felt the movement wasn’t too fast with only 12% of our playtesters thought that it was. These results lead us to believe that the movement for the player is at a good speed.

One of the most important aspects of our game is atmosphere and we use atmosphere to create tension for the player. In order to achieve the scary aesthetic during the playtest we turned off the lights as the player picked up the flashlight in the room. I posed a question to the players on the overall aesthetic of the scene “ When the lights went out how did you feel?” As the designer I want the player to feel tense as they explore the different rooms, and that at any point in time something might jump out and scare the player. I was not as successful as I had wanted in this endeavor with only 44% of my playtesters feeling tense. Moving forward, building the tension during gameplay will be one of my top priorities.

In conclusion I learned a lot from this prototype, especially in terms of how to successfully target questions to receive valid data. In our next build and forum I plan to ask questions regarding specific components and pose follow up questions regarding those components rather than assume that each player had similar experiences. Lastly I just wanted to give special thanks to Super Space Squid who was kind enough to create a video on our game and give us some great feedback. It was awesome to see our game playtested by someone outside of our major and school!