Solitude Playtesting Report

Solitude - Playtesting Report

Game Description 

You, an unnamed and solitary human pass the time each day in your bedroom. Unable to leave the confines of your room, you reach out online and play an online game. While alone at first, soon you encounter another individual, (Pim) who also seems alone. Slowly your online relationship grows as you learn to trust each other. The gameplay takes on the games you play together online, interspersed with story, and dialogue elements, as well as flashbacks to your own past. Each day you play with your friend, you gain more coloured elements on your clothing, and the world itself slowly starts to colour.

Concerns and Questions

Going in, we already had a couple of major concerns, the first of which was progression for the spike room scene. We understood the difficulty that players faced when in the spike room scene, in that the mechanic to progress was to die. This went against every instinct that gamers have built over the years so we were looking forward to how players would react when presented with a choice they would not even consider normally.

Furthermore, we wanted to reiterate some elements of the story through repetition. This was a story element that we were on the fence about and wanted to know if it fit well into our game. So the playtesting sessions would allow us to discover when this element worked and to what extent. If it did not, we would consider fine tuning it or completely removing it.

We were also interested in how immersive our world would be. We had implemented all the sound effects, music, art and interactions that we thought would keep players engaged and immersed. We now wanted to put that to the test and see if that was actually the case or if we should change up how we were approaching the problem.

Finally, we also wanted to test whether players could understand the underlying theme of the game from the piece that they were playing. This would allow us to understand what parts of our game worked and therefore we could reuse in other parts of the game and what parts of the game did not work, which we could either fine tune or take out.

Procedure

Our approach to gathering data was twofold. Firstly, qualitative feedback was collected from two panels of experts to evaluate our game. Secondly, a questionnaire was developed and distributed amongst people who we had carefully selected to collect qualitative and quantitative assessments.

Panel Feedback

This consisted of experts that participated in Alpha Game presentations as well as Ubisoft employees from the Ubisoft playtesting session.

Questionnaire Development

We wanted to understand the thought processes of the different playtesters and collect raw data. We therefore developed our questionnaire by asking general questions regarding demographics and game playing experience first. We then broke down our concerns and questions as outlined above, into different parts of our questionnaire using multiple choice questions, number scales and open ended questions to understand the effect our game had on players.

Participant Recruitment - Questionnaire 

5 participants from our target group, individuals that have experienced some form of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, were initially recruited through an online forum. This initial pool of participants were asked to distribute the game and the questionnaire to other individuals that may be interested in participating.

Participants

Table 1. Characteristics of participants completing questionnaire

Results

Panel Feedback 

Detailed notes were taken at the Alpha Game Presentations (Appendix A) and the Ubisoft playtesting session (Appendix B) .

Questionnaire 

Table 2. Quantitative responses of participants to questionnaire

Analysis

Panel Feedback

A major critique was the repetitiveness of the hallway scene. Initially, our first hallway scene included two parts, one where the lights were turned on and one where the lights were off. The player had to travel the length of the whole hallway for both parts. This was seen as very repetitive by the panel and was one of their biggest critiques (Appendix A).

Another critique was the introduction of the death mechanic which was seen as a wall for players. There was no ingame explanation for why the character had to die as well, an indication to the player, what they had to do (Appendices A and B).

Adding sound effects was also something that was brushed upon, as some objects did not have the auditory feedback that would allow the player to be further immersed into the game world. This was mentioned a few times and spoke volumes about the importance of SFX and music in our game (Appendix B).

Questionnaire

As shown in Table 1, participants were primarily female (61.5%), between 18-24 years old (76.9%), students (84.6%), and played under 5 hours of games per week (46.1%). While the sample contained a disproportionate number of females, it was mostly representative of the target population of Solitude.

Consistent with our initial hypotheses, 100% of participants enjoyed the art style of the game and found it easy to navigate. As for questions testing whether players had a sense of the direction of the story, the majority of participants (53.8%) indicated yes. However, a sizable amount indicated maybe (38.5%) and no (7.7%), indicating that this is an area that can be improved.

The reason why we had questions on intractability was because we wanted to understand how engaging the interactables were and what role they played in immersing the player into the world. Most (30.8%) rated a moderate level of obvious-ness of intractability. Along with the majority of participants (92.3%) stating they liked the interactables and a major portion (76.9%) stating they wanted to see more interactables, we understood that the interactables were a significant part of our world in engaging the player. Therefore, coming up with a plan to make them more obvious was necessary.

The final component we tested was progression and how apparent it was to players that they had to die to progress. This was a major question that we had and that we wanted to test and it was surprising to note that most of the playtesters (69.2%) found the mechanic to be quite obvious. We also wanted to know if a prompt should be included to notify the player about the direction they have to go in to progress. We had a clear tie in this situation, with 46.2% of participants indicating that there should be a prompt and 46.2% stating there should be no prompt. 

Changes

From the various playtesting sessions, we came to a decision regarding several aspects of our game. The following list represents the changes that we made in light of the data that we collected:

Removed repetitive scenes - This included an extra hallway scene, spike room scene and bedroom scene. This was pointed out early on during the Alpha presentations by the playtesters, that a scene that does not add to the atmosphere should not be included. Thus, we made the decision to make the game more concise but impactful.

Introducing a prompt in the spike room scene that would hint to the player what they needed to do. - This was done with much deliberation, since we wanted to make the hint subtle but informative, so that it wouldn’t take away from the atmosphere of the game but would still nudge the player in the right direction. Balancing these two aspects required quite a lot of thinking and multiple playtesting sessions to fine tune. In the end, we decided on a small thought the character has after a certain period of time which should allow the player to understand the situation and make the decision that would allow them to progress.

Creating more interactables -  This was the direction that we were already heading in, however the playtesting sessions reinforced this decision. Players enjoyed the interactables that we currently had implemented, so we decided to introduce even more. This included dialogues for every statue in the hallway scenes, which would give the player more insight into what the game is about and also SFX for certain objects that would allow the player to enjoy themselves more in the game that we had created. We decided to make all objects in the game interactable, which would reinforce that any object that was implemented would have a function. This change should thus make it more obvious to players what is interactable and what is not.

Implementing a calendar - This was  to introduce a measure of time for the player so that they could have a sense of how long the character had been in this mental state for. We also implemented sticky notes that would be attached to the calendar, which would allow the player to have a peak at the characters mental state and would hopefully make them more emphatic to what the character is going through, or even better, immerse the player in the game to the point where they become the character.

More objects in the bedroom scene that gave it a more messy look. - This included a garbage can and a centipede that scuttles along the floor when the lights turn off. This was to introduce a more external representation of the characters mental state that would allow the player to understand the type of game this is and the issue that we are tackling. 

Appendix A

Appendix B