Capstone Reflection #4

Hello and welcome to reflection four for this semester’s capstone! At this point in the semester, we have officially completed step four and presented our game at greenlight and we have been selected as one of the seven teams moving forward from semester one to semester two! This makes us the official first horror game to make it past greenlight in Champlain College history!

For this assignment, reflect on how your game or ideas are doing in testing. More than just thinking about bugs and glitches, think about the experience your testers are getting. Are you creating the experiences you want, or is there a gap between your intention and your results? Why?

We have been taking Achromatic to test twice a week for the entire semester and we have realized the importance of testing. It has helped us not only work out many bugs and system issues but it has given a vision for what we wanted the direction of Achromatic to be. One of the biggest parts of making a horror game is actually making sure your game is scary because that is the main experience we want to give to our players, a horrifying game that will scare them and engage them to keep playing. Testers have been responding well to our horror elements, lots of responses say players have felt scared or disoriented(which are our goals) but issues arise with getting out players fully immersed in our game. That feels like the main gap in our intention is how we get the players immersed and make the players interested in the game story and environment.

Pay particular attention to gaps between the team’s assumptions and the assumptions of the audience. This includes mechanical and gameplay discrepancies, but also intentional or unintentional messaging that moves beyond the game space itself. This could include issues of race, class, gender, context, imagery, or other things that, while not part of the core gameplay, still send messages to the audience.

The team didn’t have any strong assumptions for our games audience, I see that as one of our team’s strengths as we never set expectations for ourselves. That being said there is a general target audience for this type of game, ages 14-26 males make up the majority of horror players. This is great for marketing here at the college as that makes up a majority of student testers but can cause issues as we move forward as a lack of diverse perspectives can cause us to develop in a form of an echo chamber.

Thank you for reading! I will be back soon with another post!