I let my boyfriend playtested my game and he does not really have a strong opinion on whether staying home is better or going outside Is better. I want him to play the game and see if he understands or agree with my opinion or not. I asked him to make the choices as if he is choosing what to do in his real life. He played it for about five minutes and, after looking at the result scene that told him how much time he spent on both outdoor and indoor, he told me that he got what I was trying to convey with the game. I wanted to figure out if I gave the activities the correct amount of energy value and time value.
The response I got from him was that I should change the values of “Play Video Game” because it had the same values as “Hang Out with Friends” and also make events like “Sleep” and “Eat” generate periodically so that they are more like real-life choices. I made those changes where I made “Sleep” generate every 15 hours and “Eat” generate every 5 hours. I also added two more choices to the activities so that there are more choices that players would be able to make. I asked him if I should keep the aesthetic theme like this or should I change it into a pixel art theme and he told me that he actually like this hand-drawn feeling and it made the game feel more related to “Daily Life”, which is the title. However, another response I got was to make the texts into hand-written ones because the font I was using did not look cohesive with the overall theme of the game. I took his advise and I also drew the energy symbol and clock symbol to cooperate with that change.
He said, since this game was meant to convince my parents of my opinion, keeping the game mechanism simple could really help because they are not that familiar with playing games on a laptop that requires pressing four buttons to control a character and use “e” and “space” to interact with other elements in the game, which was my original plan for this game.
