Asterism

Full Moon
Dev Blog #06

10 September 2022

Playtesting and iteration

In June's blog post I talked about prototyping the space between the songs and how I had struggled to figure this section out. I ended the blog by saying this:

Playtesting

It's been in the back of my mind since then, and after I did a small playtest of the game with a couple of people I realised that my previous design for this section wasn't working in the way I had expected. Currently I have gameplay drafts for two thirds of the songs, which is enough to test the general pacing and tone of the game from start to end. The playtest session was the first time I'd seen anyone play the game in full so it was a great opportunity to evaluate the overall design so far. What I realised was that the 'space between' felt very unconnected to the rest of the game. It was too long, which disrupted the pacing of the game. It was unclear who the player character is and if they are the same person in and between songs. There was not enough sense of progress and the narrative of a journey outwards into space didn't come across. It would also have led to a lot of extra work for me with the amount of narrative and audio content, that if anything I think would have detracted from the overall experience.

I'm glad that I was able to see this in action before I continued any further along that path, but it was hard to evaluate until this point - without seeing it in the context of the full game. From the prototype I had made so far and the playtesting session I was able to go through another round of iteration to refine the design further.

Iteration

After the playtesting I went through several steps to get to the version I'm at right now.

STEP 1: Brainstorm potential solutions.
I made a list of broad design fixes based on the playtest feedback and my general thoughts on what was missing so far. These were:
- the space between should be shorter
- there should be consistent objects or other motifs to link scenes together
- there needs to be a greater presence of the player character throughout the game
- the narrative running between songs needs to be clearer
- there should be more reminders of your overall progress

Using this list, I sketched out a few ideas to think about the progress and narrative issues.



I came across another definition for the word 'Asterism', which is the star-shaped pattern of refraction in certain gemstones. Usually it creates a 6-pointed star, though in some cases it can create a 12-pointed star. I got a little sidetracked with this, since there are 12 tracks on the album it felt like something I might be able to use... maybe I'll come back to this one day but for now it's staying in the back of my mind. I've also had the image of a radio tower at the end of each level for some time, with the idea that it's the source of each song signal that you're looking for. I drew a few sketches of the player recording the signal and decoding it, which would then link up to a visual of the album tracks. Some other ideas here are a log book, 'little clay models in space', and progress indicators in and between songs.

At the moment I'm also commissioning artwork for each song on the album, and now that I've seen some of it it's very exciting and I want to place more emphasis on it within the game. The idea of recording and decoding the song signal fits in with this really well, as the player could 'decode' the album artwork at the end of each track. This would also help with the sense of progress, if you were able to see the artwork in between songs.

STEP 2: Narrow down ideas.
The next thing I did was to try and pick out only the ideas from step 1 that would clarify the narrative, rather than add extra unnecessary layers.



I also started sequencing this like a storyboard to get a feel for the pacing. I removed the radio tower in favour of a soundwave progress bar in the song that gets recorded onto a cassette tape at the end of the song, followed by a zoom out to the ship in space where the player decodes the album artwork. Pretty soon I realised that I needed the ability to move my sketches around, swap their order and shift things around, so I moved to a paper prototype of the storyboard.

STEP 3: Create a paper prototype.
This image is actually the second iteration of the storyboard after I drew an initial set of frames and tested flicking through them. Being able to go through them one by one in this paper prototype was extremely helpful to my design process and gave me a good sense of the sequence of events. I moved a few frames around, removed some and added others before I moved on from this step.



Here's a video of me talking through the storyboard (it starts on a different frame from the image, but the whole thing is a loop anyway):



STEP 4: Create a digital prototype.
Once I felt happy with the storyboard paper protype I moved on to create a digital version of it. I also updated the ship-interior UI in the game to be a 3D model. This is partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because I really really don't like working with Unity's UI system, so I'm doing my best to avoid it as much as possible. Here's a few sketches my partner and I had fun drawing for spaceship cockpit ideas.



A lot of these are very inspired by one of my favourite childhood games, Exploropedia: World of Nature, which, in my opinion, has some of the greatest UI of all time.

The interface was beginning to take shape, and the transitions felt a lot smoother and made more sense narratively.



STEP 5: Self-evaluate and iterate (repeat steps 3 and 4).
I played through a few times and tweaked anything that felt off, trying not to focus too much on the small details. For this step I was switching between the paper and digital versions, depending on how quickly I needed to test if an idea worked. This version seemed to fix a lot of the issues I had from the initial playtest session and I'm pretty happy with how it feels overall! It will still be a work in progress throughout the project, so I'm sure I'll make further iterations in the future too, but it's enough to allow me to continue with other areas of the game for now.

Previous Full Moon Dev Blog

Next Full Moon Dev Blog

Sign up to my newsletter to get updates about the project!