Glowing Garden
Glowing Garden was my Capstone Project at University of California - Santa Cruz's (UCSC) Games and Playable Media MS program. This project required every student to create a game from pitch to demo over 6 months. Due to external circumstances Glowing Garden needed to be completed in 3 months. I served as our team's UX researcher and the highlights of my role are included below.
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01
Playtest organizing and recruiting
One of my responsibilities was scheduling and conducting organized weekly playtests of our game to find what players found fun and guide the shape of our game's development. I ran 2-4 playtests each week over our 10 week dev cycle, with each playtetest focused on gathering insights on what players liked and didnt like in our weekly builds.
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The organization process included recruiting participants from the in person and remote student body via recruitment forms, sending a test build to participants over google drive, and organizing zoom calls with remote participants during quarantine or meeting between classes.
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A script I created and used to brief participants during a playtest conducted midway through Glowing Garden's development can be read at the PDF to the right.
Glowing Garden: Playtest Briefing Script
02
Playtest Data collection and analysis
After participants were gathered, briefed, and consented to recording, I observed their gameplay in real time through screen sharing and recording software Zoom screen share, OBS, and Discord. I instructed playtesters to vocalize their feedback in the moment through Think-Alouds and recorded any insightful comments in an Excel spreadsheet.
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I analyzed the collection of findings after each playtests to find common praise, complaints, and critiques across all participants, sorted this feedback by color for the engineering team's convienience.
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The results of a playtest conducted late into production can be seen at the PDF to the right.
Glowing Garden Week 5 Post Playtest Analysis Summary