Puzzle creation and preparation for the first playtesting session were the highlights of this week. The psychology of puzzles became the topic of discussion during the Monday lecture. The ideal puzzle should be designed in such a way that the players are in a flow state where the difficulty of the task is balanced by the player’s skills. In this way, the players would get neither bored nor nervous.
The objective of this week’s playtesting session was to test our core loop. As expected, the live playtesting gave us invaluable information that will help us refine our design. First, it made us realize a huge flaw in our scope: having interactions for four different game characters was simply too much content. Our programmer felt it was too difficult to complete in our short timeframe, so we made the decision to cut our scope down to just one character, Tyler. Furthermore, players found our current dialogue mechanics confusing and hard to understand. Because of this, we decided we needed to improve and completely change our gameplay mechanics. On a positive note, we officially resolved last week’s team debate. We all agreed that the central gameplay will focus entirely on social interaction, since the main purpose of the game is to understand autistic individuals and the difficulties they face in daily life.