Soul Void (Playtesting-Report)

This is a Playtest-Report from Team Clueless for Fach Game Design Fundamentals.

Playtest-Details

Interview

Things the players liked

The game has a nice looking color scheme, visual presentation and is aesthetically pleasing. The themes and the idea are really interesting, the body horror elements make it really cool and unique. The game has great character design as well as an intriguing world building and is cute and mysterious. It is functional in all aspects it wants to be, but you have to find out what it is all about by yourself. After acquiring certain objects, the game becomes more engaging. Some details were rather pointless, but funny. The flowers indicate where you can walk, which is done using WASD not just arrow keys.

Things the players didn't like

The game feels “aimless” at first. There is no real reason to do anything or go anywhere because your character just appears and has to “look for the plot”. The gameplay is boring and basic, there isn’t really a lot to do. As the character you have no motivation and it is exhausting to play. In addition to that, the controls are strange, you cannot go left or right at the same time as going up or down. The walk animation is not great. A lot of the game is static and could really benefit from some animation. The game also has no sound or music, which subtracts form the experience (however that might be intentional). The dialogue seems basic and is not very original. It seems one would have to be very bored and have a lot of spare time, in order to want to play this game. It is annoying.

Suggestions for improvement

The story could be improved a lot, as well as the movement mechanics. It is also not clear what you can interact with, so maybe a visualization of intractable objects would improve the game.

Game Experience Questionnaire results

This table shows the average results for each single question of the Game Experience Questionnaire.

Question	Statement	Average value
1	I felt content	1.6
2	I felt skilful	1.3
3	I was interested in the game's story	2.3
4	I thought it was fun	1.6
5	I was fully occupied with the game	2.2
6	I felt happy	1.5
7	It gave me a bad mood	0.8
8	I thought about other things	1.6
9	I found it tiresome	2.0
10	I felt competent	1.6
11	I thought it was hard	0.5
12	It was aesthetically pleasing	3.0
13	I forgot everything around me	1.6
14	I felt good	1.6
15	I was good at it	2.6
16	I felt bored	2.3
17	I felt successful	1.3
18	I felt imaginative	1.5
19	I felt that I could explore things	2.3
20	I enjoyed it	2.1
21	I was fast at reaching the game's targets	2.0
22	I felt annoyed	1.3
23	I felt pressured	0.5
24	I felt irritable	1.5
25	I lost track of time	1.6
26	I felt challenged	0.8
27	I found it impressive	1.2
28	I was deeply concentrated in the game	1.2
29	I felt frustrated	1.5
30	It felt like a rich experience	1.8
31	I lost connection with the outside world	1.0
32	I felt time pressure	0.3
33	I had to put a lot of effort into it	0.3

Evaluating the different components

These are the 7 components of the Questionnaire, with their respective average results.

Competence (questions 2, 10, 15, 17 und 21): 1.8
Sensory and Imaginative Immersion (questions 3, 12, 18, 19, 27 und 30): 2.0
Flow (questions 5, 13, 25, 28 und 31): 1.5
Tension/Annoyance (questions 22, 24 und 29): 1.4
Challenge (Fragen 11, 23, 26, 32 und 33): 0.5
Negative affect (questions 7, 8, 9 und 16): 1.7
Positive affect (questions 1, 4, 6, 14 und 20): 1.7