Adam's prototype devlog

The Unknowns: Some of the unknowns while working on the Figma prototype is HOW players will interact with it. When they first open the prototype (after the introduction) they will be met with 3 different icons they can interact with. The 2 on the right sort of acts as the tutorial/guidance the player will use, while the one on the left acts as the sort of gameplay experience. My assumption going into this is that the player will interact with the 2 on the right first because they visually standout more than the 1 on the left. On top of that, I also wasn't sure if the player will just try to guess their way through the fake emails or if they will go back and double check its authenticity with the email formats icon.

The prototype: For my prototype I used Figma to build a very small scale of our intended gameplay experience. They will have to go through a very small list of emails and choosing whether to send it to the recipient or not.  Players will still have access to the Email formats, and it is their job to use it to see if it aligns with the email they're about to send out. If they're no errors, they send it, and if there are errors, they decline it.

The evaluation: My main evaluation is to see if the player will utilize all the tools that is presented in front of them. I will also be keeping note on how many emails they correctly guess are fake in addition to them going back and double checking the formats. I needed to make sure players had access to go back to the previous pages to check on any information and tutorials they may have missed.

There can be multiple ways to fabricate a phishing scam email, so here I'm only focusing on the email's intro, contents of the message, and send off. They are also color coded to add that sort of extra detail players will have to focus on. For now, I had to keep things very simple before we implemented more complex features like having links attached to the emails.

The learnings: Players would often interact with the icons in an orderly fashion, meaning they clicked on the email list first and see how far they can continue onward. This meant they skipped the tutorial altogether, meaning they didn't have a clear idea of what the goal/objective really is. I had to swiftly then add another mini tutorial before they processed to the actual gameplay.

With that being said I'm happy to report that the sample of players guessed the majority of emails correctly.  I learned that if there is key information the player absolutely needs to know before proceeding, it's better to force it in their face by some means, and not to leave it aside as something they could potentially miss.

Informing the project: This informs both the team and I that players have the capacity on executing our intended experience. Which is utilizing the tools accessible to them to properly identify if the emails they are going to send out are scams or not. They often did go back to review their notes and did side by side comparisons between the formats and the actual emails. The scope still remains big as we intend to add more features like links and downloadable content to the emails while also being procedurally generated through our system.