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Week 9: First User Tests

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHktu-YgI5G/

This week I got to test the experience on two users. I will summarize the most important feedback points:

  1. The head mechanic can be adjusted so that the player feels like they have more control over where they move. One of the users instinctively pressed the grip button when they saw the head in an area they wanted to move to (while it was still rolling). They did this several times throughout the game.
  2. Cosmetic changes — the world can be less saturated so as to place more importance on the characters and unorthodox actions.
  3. Wall collisions need to be re-designed. As of now, whenever the headset hits a wall the screen goes black. This needs to be improved so that the user isn’t placed in that situation as often. Maybe the wall colliders can be moved “inside” a bit so that they always teleport beside the wall, beyond the point of fading to black.
  4. A huge one that looms large over VR applications: how to clearly distinguish what is interactable from what isn’t interactable. I had tried doing this with sound, an example I had seen in other PC games, but it seems that is not enough in a virtual world. I will need to give more visual cues.
  5. Both users wanted more guidance (more visual cues and subtitles for the narration). One went as far as to suggest having a menu which would always tell you what your next task was.

Overall, they both enjoyed the head mechanic and the concept of the game. They both described the interesting meeting of an ordinary task (getting tea) in a surreal, glitch world.

One user took 35 minutes to complete the experience and the other took an hour and 15 minutes.

Week 6: Ready for User Test #1

This week I scrambled to get everything together for my first user test. I had decided to have all the sections of the story up until 5,6, and 7 ready for AR, as well as their corresponding puzzles.

In order to do this, this week I:
1. Finished the section of the story about the cigarette guy.

2. Added a custom script so that the slider UI of the record player controls the world speed.


3. Finished the third puzzle, where you become a bird and have to find the grandma character in the clouds. Once you do that, a thumbs up appears and the next section of the story is unlocked (the conversation with grandma).


4. I added the script that checks whether 2/3 of the first puzzles have been completed, in order to get the fifth marker (for the story section about the birds).


5. I added the player one model, a model for Romaine, with a walking cycle and a running cycle. There are some issues with the mesh now so I can only add one material, but this will be fixed in the later iterations, as well as adding onto the model a vertex shader.


6. I made the UI for all the instructions and story AR markers I need for the first user test.


7. I made and built the app with the first four markers for iOS.


8. I added a pause menu so that the user can pause and/or quit the game.

There is still so much to do and polish, but I am confident I will have a decent proof of concept done by the end of the unit (June 19th).