Hi! Welcome back!

I was meaning to write something earlier, but miscellaneous things such as paperwork and updating my portfolio took a surprisingly long amount of time. Now I’m back to honours thought.

Last we left off, I had submitted the honours pre-development portfolio and summarised it here.

Since then, I’ve been reading a little, and doing prototype a lot. Here’s a playthrough of it now:

https://youtu.be/Bf-GCX2QyKk

Problems with the prototype

I tested out this prototype in class — I couldn’t test the full version obviously as that would have needed people to go out into the places, but I typed out the answers to the riddles so that I could test other aspects — and it was fairly illuminating.

Originally, my plan was to continue on to developing a memory mechanic. However, I already got what I needed out of testing this version of the prototype — the next problems to solve.

So, now the new plan is to ponder on the problems here and solve the most important ones first, before moving on to memory mechanic. I’ll go through the prototype here bit by bit reflecting on both my own thoughts and the feedback I got from my testers.

Scene 1: Landmark app

The game starts out as this innocent sort of landmark app. You tap on different landmarks and find out more about them complete with a picture.

Playtest observations and comments of this scene

• Both playtesters actually read the landmark app texts
• “Why are the landmarks ordered this way, instead of alphabetically?”
• “Shouldn’t there be pictures of the landmarks?” (In the initial screen that lists them out)
• “A map would be amazing, as this is the first screen that the player sees.”

My thoughts

I think it would be a very good idea to have an actual map here, and I can already picture how I would do this — drawing the symbols for the landmarks you could press to find out more in Krita with some ink and watercolour, being in line with the storybook-like art style I want the characters to have in the end.