Mortimer Play Testing: Round 1

This past week (for 08/15 - 08/21) has been both a busy and momentous one for this year's HVRE team. Not only did we present our project at this round of Hurdles (a type of "slow game jam" for local devs) for RunJumpDev, while letting everyone there know where we were with our progress, at that particular moment, but we also were able to finish up all loose ends for each puzzle - so that each one could both be completed correctly and each puzzle being within a certain sequence - and we were also able to begin Alpha play testing with three of our testers who had never seen the game before!

Each tester seemed more than willing to play the game (from start to finish), and give both personal and constructive criticism as to their experiences. On average, it seemed all three were able to finish this version of the game within less than 20 minutes - which is obviously a bit shy of the 50-minute experience we had hoped for - however, knowing that more narrative and overall details will be added in for later versions (and the fact that possibly 5 people will be playing instead of 1), that would more than likely tack on the needed minutes we are shooting for.

Other than a similar completion time, the testers were all a bit different on their personal opinions of the puzzles and the game itself (more often being of a positive opinion, other than a few things dealing with linearity and lack of present implementation of story elements we plan to add in the near future), and seemed to enjoy themselves and helping us out. On a constructive note, they all believe that certain puzzles may have been too easy, or certain mechanics (like the first puzzle's "snapping system") were kind of annoyingly made. It is good to note that a few, new, fresh pairs of eyes was a welcome step in our game's evolution, and we are determined to fix what was broken (which luckily wasn't much), and elaborate - then fine-tune - on what we already have.

We would love to thank Tommy, George, and Bill for coming out Sunday to test our game, and we hope to see them back at a later date, for a later version, to see and test our progress. For those wanting to possibly play test, we are definitely still taking people on; so if you are indeed interested, please follow the link below, follow the large arrow for another link, which takes you to a simple and easy form for you to fill out, so that we may know and contact you!

http://hvredev.wixsite.com/home