Sukhdeep Prototype

What needed to be tested?

I decided for my prototype that I would make I would try to make it so I could playtest and record players reactions to a story within the content of the emails they would read. Well also testing if they could read the emails and be engaged well not feeling forced to read them. An unknown I had at the time that I needed to confirm is how well could a player tell what email a scam was and what email wasn’t a scam. 

The Prototype

The prototype I ended up making was a series of ten scam emails and ten normal emails that all take place in the same location/level with a story to go along with it. The story was that you are working for a moon border control company responsible for preventing any alien from entering earth with out proper clearance. Your job however is to mange to emails that get sent in or out of the place and declare if they are safe for employees to have access to or to deny as it is a scam. I would mix and match the normal emails from one word doc and mix them with the scam emails from another word doc and then put them into a single word doc that would be used for the playtest. I used this to create and randomness a few options for playtesting with a similar normal to scam ratio of emails. I could then have one page show up on screen at a time let the player read said email tell me if they think it was safe or a scam and move to the next email.

Results

During playtesting I found that players were able to stay engaged with the motion of reading emails and enjoyed the content inside each email. However, I found that the player would sometimes feel overwhelmed with the amount of text and content in an email that it could take a lot of time for them to find out what the scam was. Some emails including one around a delivery confused some players about how it was a scam making it clear that better communication and writing of emails would need to be done to help the player better identify scams like it. another player said they enjoyed the story and it made the aspect of reading the emails not mundane. 

Aftermath

I noticed that the short 10 emails coming from so many different sources to and from caused confusion for players. It is due to that fact that we decided to change the story and make it focused that you are just working at a company instead to cause less confusion to the player. This was a team decision based on feedback from all team member prototypes. Another thing we decide to change is the scale of the story as to not have the story overtake the main aspect and goal of our game which is to teach the player to identify scam emails in there day to day life. Another aspect we decide to change was the way we write the emails for the email generator for our game as we don’t want too much content to distract the player well keeping just enough to hook them in. In this case this meant no more long paragraph type emails, however we put in some story emails that are not randomly generated.