From the doc: Playtesting, playability, and interfaces

This is part of the write-up of our final playtest. It talks about some of the ways that the game was confusing and hard to understand, and the  interface adjustments we made on the fly (as the playtest was going on) to take care of this. Slightly edited to remove references to the rest of the doc, although some familiarity with the game itself is still assumed.

Observing the testers play the game and reading their comments gave me some insight into the relationship between confusion and fun. There are at least two types of confusion people experience about Micro Missions. Being confused about why certain things are happening in the story or how the mini-games fit together does not seem to bother people, and is amusing for most. However, a lot of people were also confused about what they were “supposed to” do next: where to go, who to talk to, and what to click on. That type of confusion proved to be frustrating and reduced the fun of the game.

This second type of confusion was primarily caused by a lack of directions, unclear directions or interface, and directions that went away too quickly. To fix the last problem, we actually doubled the time that the mini-game instructions stayed on the screen shortly after the playtest started. This helped quite a bit. There was also a feature that allowed players to press escape and get more detailed instructions during a mini-game, but not many people knew about this feature, since not everyone read the instructions for the game before starting.

The instruction screen also explained what each button on the HUD interface does, and what situations they might be useful in, which would have also helped mitigate some of the confusion. Perhaps putting these instructions up on the screen as a starting cutscene of sorts would allow more players to use the game’s interface effectively to reduce the “bad” kind of confusion.

Most of the confusion about lack of direction centered around traveling through the game world. Players seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding the relationship between locations and the mini-game chains that were associated with them, and they could not easily grasp the idea of pressing the travel button in order to see their location on the world map and travel across that map.

To mitigate these problems, we made two interface changes to the game during the playtest. First, we added a one-second delay before the player arrives at a new location and starts the interaction there. During this delay, the player could see the world map as it panned from their original location to the next one. This way, the player could see where they were and where they ended up before they actually entered the next location. The panning part of the feature actually already existed, but was obscured by the HUD once we added splash screens to each location, which covered up the map when it panned.

We also added a small tutorial-like feature to the game: we added one-time highlighting to certain buttons on the HUD for certain locations. These were the buttons that the player is “supposed to” press if he wants to progress in the story at the beginning of these games. Pressing these buttons once disabled the highlighting for the rest of the game.

Following the highlighted buttons got the player to the Tavern and allowed them to get their first quest. By this time, the player would familiarize themselves with what most button types on the HUD do: Map button to travel, Explore button to enter or "use" a location, character portraits to interact with characters.

Judging by informal observation, these two interface changes seemed to increase playability dramatically, although we did not run any further formal comparison playtests. There were two big problems that seem to have gone away with these changes.

The first problem was knowing what button to press to progress the first time the HUD appears in the Bandit Clearing. Prior to that area, the travel interaction came up automatically, without requiring the user to choose to travel. Players were not sure which button achieved the “move the story along” result, and tended to press the “attack the bandit” button over and over instead of going to the map to travel. With the tutorial highlighting, it became obvious to the players that the next thing to do was to press the travel button. Some players still chose to first explore the location further, but this time it was a conscious choice.

The second problem appeared at the sewers area: the sewers are meant to be a mode of transportation, to get the player from the city gate to inside the city and vice versa. But instead of going through the sewers once and then continuing to travel normally, most people tended to keep entering the sewers over and over again, without realizing that they were changing their location every time.

The panning feature showed the players visually that their location has changed, eliminating a large part of that confusion. The tutorial highlighting also prompted the players to only enter the sewers once, and then travel after that, letting them realize that they’ve moved inside the city.