Week 5 – Player Experience & Interation

February 28, 2026

Monday:

Puzzle Design:

Define the problem/challenge
Have clear objectives
There are available tools
Have repeatable play patterns
There are variations and upgrades

Good puzzle need:

Novelty
Challenge:

Too easy will make players feel boring. But too difficult puzzle will make players feel frustration

Puzzle Type：

Spatial
Environmental
Physics-based
Logical

From a core mechanism – pass a test – variants- simplify- Only the ones that really work are left

Plan of the playtesting:

Gather feedback from players unfamiliar with the game
Choose a clear feature to test
Goal: 5-7 high quality tests

Key concepts：

If the player doesn’t understand what the game is about, if the player experience is confusing, that’s a design problem, not a player problem.

What we need to test:

Core Loop:

Is the game fun?

Are emotions reached?

Which point makes it unfun?

Narrative:

Does the player understand?

Does it generate the expected emotions?

What do players think of the story?

Mechanic & Ability:

Is it understood?

Is the teaching effective?

Is the operation comfortable?

Is it fun?

Playtesting Document:

what you want to test:

Because I’m a Technical Designer so part of what I need to test is whether the mechanics I’ve crafted can be implemented in UE5 and understood by the player.

Movement of the player
Player pickup function
Automatic NPC patrols
NPCs tracking players
Level jumping
Increase and decrease in player nervous

My work during the playtest:

On the day of the playtest I was in charge of explaining the game to the players and collecting feedback from everyone.

FeedBack:

Marie: Supermarket routes are a bit confusing and need signs and notices to tell players what they need to do and where they are.

Yansong Deng：Backstory is needed to tell the player how to get to the supermarket. Need signs to remind the player.

Jiayun Zou：The long press on E to pick up items is not very comfortable, I hope it will be changed to long press on the left mouse button.

Zixuan Zou:The mirror can be placed on the table. Players could have more overlapping patrol areas and quick NPC face pops around corners. Toilets are hard to find and need to be more visible.

Hanwen Liu：Wish there was a sprint feature so you could run past NPCs.

Yushan Yao(ME)：The player’s birth position needs to be adjusted, and there is a high chance that the player will enter another space without clearing it. Players are very fond of throwing items around, if there is time add item crushing feature.

Conclusion：

Many players find the lack of clear signage in the scene confusing.

In the final scenario I’ll include more signage, like a real-life mall, that will indicate where the player is located.

Players find the pickup button uncomfortable and need a different, more comfortable way to do it.

I’ve changed it to long press the left mouse button for pickup and release for item drop.

Would like to see sprinting added

This proposal was rejected by me because, in conjunction with our game’s backstory, the protagonist’s character wouldn’t engage in behaviour that would easily attract attention in a public place. This proposal goes against the backstory.

My week 5 working progress:

Bedroom Greybox:

This is the player’s initial room, where the player is born at the start of the game. I designed it according to my dormitory layout. But the final layout will change.

Player Tension UI and Tension Increase and Decrease：

This is because a player who touches a toilet mirror decreases the tension value, and who touches an NPC increases the tension value. Since the player is a character and the toilet mirror is an item so I used two different methods to implement this.

The player blueprint also implements that when the tension value is full the player will automatically return to the initial room due to shame.