Today is No Rules Day, which means we’re doing everything _but_ work. Why? Because one day spent on doing “anything else but…” helps us gain some energy, gain some more ideas and process some of the problems that can occur during development. Furthermore – we’ve been really, really busy this week and tackled some really interesting issues, so we deserve some time off.
One of the main things this week was our first multi-player test. So far, we’ve been doing tests for the single player mode, which are relatively easy to conduct. Three days, several time slots, our test software and willing test subjects are relatively easy to handle. A whole new difficulty is bringing more people together, on the same day, at the same time and place and have them play together a game mode, that heavily relies on communication.
This is a screenshot from the game Portal 2. The copyright for it is held by Valve Corporation, who created the software.
For this test we couldn’t fall back on Silverback, our trusted Guerilla usability test software, to tape the test persons and their actions and comments. We had to go back to analogue testing. Two of us were constantly watching the group of 5 people, while one of us grabbed one of the players not playing to interview them. We had to made sure that everyone plays everything, tries everything and sees everything to be able to give us the best feedback possible.
For the first time, we’ve had to give out NDAs to our testers. We’ve now entered the super-secretive phase in which we need to make sure that nothing leaks out before we can gladly and proudly announce all the amazing things we’re working on. So we had to shove some legal papers in our tester’s faces before they could dive into the full Chasing Aurora Multiplayer Exerience. We do feel a little bad for this but can’t be too careful at this stage. Since two of our testers added a few tasks to our SCRUM board, when we weren’t looking, we were assured that we’re not overdoing it with our NDAs.
What else was done? We took a look at the results from the test and interviews and already worked out some changes to improve some of the points that weren’t working correctly or simply needed improvement. We’ve also worked on more single player levels, some more multi player levels and a few other things that are strongly connected to the secret platform we are yet to announce.
This week’s achievements:
- Conducted multi player test with 14 test subjects
- Analyzed test feedback
- Improved multi player mode
- Secret platform things