Solving the Mystery Using the Wizard of Oz Method
7This talk discusses how we found an inexpensive, highly actionable, and ecological way to gather players feedback early. It details the research challenges and solutions throughout the development of The Irregular, an ambitious episodic mystery game.
With only a few short months to produce a playable demo, game studio Octothrope knew that they needed to minimize financial risk by leveraging user testing every step of the way, but with minimal overhead cost. To achieve this, they planned to test as much as possible on paper with real players before implementing anything in a digital space in hopes of reducing costly backtracking in development.
This talk discusses how they planned, the procedures used, what was learned, and how this impacted the design and research processes moving forward. This talk also explores how early paper prototype testing impacted design decisions and how plans were altered for user testing based on the results from earlier tests.
How do you test an NPC character with a paper prototype? This talk reviews how the team was inspired by Wizard of Oz and why they decided to use a role-playing moderator, including how to test a prototype voiceover script in such early stages.
Lanie Dixon, Ubisoft
Lanie Dixon is a User Researcher at Ubisoft Montreal. Prior to Ubisoft she was the Co-Founder and Director of User Research at Octothorpe game studio in Salt Lake City Utah. In addition to her work with Octothorpe, Lanie was one of the four game developers and business owners running the Utah Games Guild, a volunteer organization working to promote and support local indie game development in Utah. Lanie also a member of the steering committee for the GRUX-SIG.
#gamesUR Conference
Games User Research focuses on players’ psychology and their behaviour via techniques such as playtesting, analytics, expert analysis, and others. Game User Researchers aim to help game developers deliver players the best gaming experience possible.
The #gamesUR Conference is a biannual gathering of the world's top professionals in games user research. For more information visit www.gamesurconf.com