Feb 27th - March 7th

The past week we've had our first playtests - first with a group of first-years at UofT, and finally with members of UofT's resident game development club.

For each play test we prepared a short survey for players to fill out after their playthrough. 

Playtest 1: March 6th

We managed to get 8 players to test our game. A majority of them asked for more clarity on controls - ex: displaying "press E to pickup/E to drop" as players were having difficulty understanding what each button press would do in a given situation.  The horror and communication on what was dangerous still needed work - nearly all players reported that the face/stain designs we had were not scary, and did not bother avoiding them as they were unaware that they were losing health. Players were also confused on what the purpose of doing the tasks were, as there appeared to be no clear reason for the tasks. To address some of these issues, we adjusted the lighting to make the house darker, started creating some new face designs, and added more audio and visual cues to the player taking damage, such a red vignette that appears briefly to indicate damage being taken. The most notable change we made was the addition of a short beginning cutscene to set the scene and mood for what was to come in the game.

Playtest 2: March 7th

We were unable to get as many players for this playtest, but we still got some great feedback. We saw some definite improvement in how the game was received after adding in the cutscene, as players now had more clarity on the goal of the game. Many of the issues that were reported were the same as the issues reported previously that we did not have time to fully fix, so we are now focused on fixing bugs and continuing to improve the game based on the feedback we received, such as fixing inconsistent hit boxes for some interactable objects and adding more UI for controls.