By the time the date of our first play test had come around we had prepared a number of areas for the play testers to explore. This included our main outdoor area, the balloon mini game stall, and the circus which while implemented was not yet accessible. However, while the circus was not yet ready for entry, players would still be able to work towards the entry requirements. 

Our goal for this initial testing session was to analyse and understand how our players would navigate the level, see if they could understand how to access the circus, and understand if players found the overall theme of the game engaging. To obtain this information, we asked players to play through the game while our team remained silent. We had requested that play testers speak aloud, as though they were streaming, with any thoughts or feelings that may pop up during their game play. Once play testing was completed we would ask our four key questions; 

1. How engaging did you find the game's overall theme?

2. Did you understand your objective? If so, what in the game gave you that information? If not, what do you feel would have helped clarify your goal?

3. Did you have any issues navigating through the game, why or why not?

4. Do you have any other feedback?

We had also wanted to make sure we got a wide variety of play testers and while it did include other developers in our class, we had also sought out our own testers which included various ages but also those who regularly played games and those who didn't.

The results of the play test were informative. While all of the players were able to identify their objective and understand that the balloon mini game would grant them tickets and 'x' amount of tickets would grant them entry into the circus, many had shared the same concern regarding the mini game itself. 

You see, as our game is based in a carnival we were heavily inspired by the theme and fully leaned into what that entails... including rigged mini games. To achieve this, we had the cross hair of the mini game wiggle around rather wildly (okay, extremely wildly), making it difficult for the player to get a good aim. It would slow as the player would hold down M1, but upon the feedback from our play testers and our own team's reflection, it truly didn't have the feel we hoped for. Instead it got reactions of confusion, frustration, and some even wondering if they had just stumbled upon a most imposing bug. 

Further responses we had received included our main menu audio being much too loud (sorry head phone users!), one of our play testers walking off into the lovely blue nothingness that is Unity's default background, and of course the theme being there... but not quite. As most of our play testers were able to understand that we were going for a horror themed environment, the horror was simply not there... no really, it genuinely wasn't. We had no horror assets, simply some of the art and a majority of placeholders. However despite this, we were delighted that people could feel what experience we were going for they just couldn't see it yet. Meaning that our final art was going to become of utmost importance for two of our three team members. 

On the opposite end, we had quite a few pieces of positive feedback many of which went on to be crucial for our games future development. A piece of feedback we had received from our class was that the art that was implemented looked like a story book, almost dream like.  Many of our play testers enjoyed the amount of NPC's and engaging with them, as well as  the exploration component of our game.  We also found that given the style of our game and being almost nostalgic in its level design, some of our play testers ran off to the left initially, calling on their knowledge of old-school games, instead of the expected right while exclaiming "gotta check for secrets!" which set off a light bulb in our team... or three. 

- FOTL Devs  🎈