It's been a busy week! 

On playtesting

With the December thesis milestone approaching we've been playtesting when we can. We started adding a kind of paper prototype of sorts to the experience where we transition to the conversation in the Song household and try to get players to work through solving / responding to the first directive from the commanding officer. This involves playing a 3 ½ minute audio clip with the map placed in front of the player. The player is also given a red game piece. 

Essentially this is also workshopping the first drafts of the dialogue between the characters that the player spies on. It is a little bit of a convoluted process to switch the player between the Unity project and an actual paper map, but it's been almost necessary to test out how the information is coming across as a proof of concept. It is quicker for us than implementing it in Unity and it gets this material in front of players immediately. We've had really great advisors & guest critics coming by giving us feedback. Some of the main feedback we are getting:

• How will you telegraph / guide the players? What is intro and set-up like? Current intro v.o. felt like flavor text, but is actually critical to understanding what actions to take next.
• It's sometimes unclear to the player what to do with map & game piece while simultaneously listening to the recorded conversation (i.e. the verb they are operating on versus all the nouns they hear).
• Very dense, detailed world.
• Who am I as a player?

So a lot of things are happening that we need to address. After playtesting with the intro v.o. today, I revised the language slightly. I now have the commanding officer addressing the player in the second person with "you":

We're going to playtest with this revised intro v.o. and hope it is clearer. We're also addressing how best to onboard or guide players. We're going to try using a ghost-like semi-transparent animation to guide the player to interact with and tune the radio. Another thought crossed my mind with the intro. Maybe by reducing the amount of words/removing voice over and pairing it with images similar to this post in Lucas Pope's devlog on the intro to Papers, Please will help.

On narrative (but more specifically, naming fictional cities and nations)

Place names are hard. I'm struggling to figure out how to properly name fictional countries and cities. I've browsed through Fantasy Name Generators (which I think I mentioned in a previous post). There is a "city and town" generator with different regional options ranging from more realistic to the fantastical. 

I've used this primarily as place holders in the script for playtesting purposes. I do still use search engines to make sure what I pick doesn't have some kind of inappropriate meaning in another language or isn't offensive. 

It's something I'm still thinking through, but at the moment don't have the luxury to pause and think too much about. I actually went down a rabbit hole in the Papers, Please development blog and the localization post-mortem recently. Lucas Pope's devlogs are super detailed and useful to think through some of the design and overall development challenges we face as well. And Pope's localization post-mortem gave me a lot to think about re: fictional country names in different languages. Papers, Please is very much more about the Eastern Bloc and he discusses complications with place names. He even shares this spreadsheet with some of the translators' notes. I want to stay true to the concept that this game takes place in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II so I want to avoid very European sounding place names. This is something I will tackle more diligently after the milestone next week.