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Finally, after three months of hard work, we showcased a demo of Keeper’s Veil for the very first time at The John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. It was quite a nerve-wracking experience as, up until now, most of our play testing has been with other game developers or people who are somewhat familiar with our project. Whereas now, general members of the public would be seeing/playing Keeper’s Veil without any prior knowledge or with limited experience with video games in general.
With a 9 am start, we arrived at the gallery to begin setting up for the day. Unfortunately, there were not enough arcade cabinets for each team to have one to themselves, and they were already painted in previous years. On the other hand, we were lucky to share one with a team who’s game has a similar atmosphere to Keeper’s Veil and the cabinet we were assigned was painted a foreboding, blood red.
Our decorated arcade cabinet
We had brought with us some decorations to help attract people’s interest in hopes of drawing them to play our game. A fishing net with sea shells tied to it was hung around half of the cabinet, while the other side had a lantern and two tall candles. It wasn’t too much but multiple people did positively comment on the decorations once they had come over!
As expected, people found it difficult to engage with the text. It was incredibly noisy in the gallery with all of the cabinets next to each other and another event taking place in the same room. So it wasn't the most ideal setting - as proved by two young boys who were trying to speedrun our visual novel - but we did get some good ideas for the narrative as well as made many observations concerning the mechanics.
Out of everyone who played Keeper’s Veil, there was one man in particular who spent a considerable time playing and talking to us about the game. It seemed English wasn't his first language, so asked me to read it to him which later prompted the idea of adding voice acting to the game. Voice acting is something we have considered before as a fun, possible feature to add, but we now realise that it could open up Keeper’s Veil to a wider audience. Not only could voice acting make the game more engaging to younger people or those who don't enjoy reading, but to those who struggle with reading - especially this style of writing.
Keeper’s Veil being played
On the other hand, we gained a lot of valuable insight in regards to how players approach and respond to the mechanics of Keeper’s Veil. There were some bugs that were present in the game at the time of the gallery and so we were anticipating they would cause some issues. However, there were some problems players encountered that we are grateful for bringing to our attention.
John Hansard Gallery
The biggest example of this was that many players didn’t seem to notice the differences within the dialogue boxes. When dialogue choices for them to pick between in order to progress the story appeared, they seemed to miss them entirely; rather than clicking an option they would instead continue trying to click ‘Next’. To remedy this, we have decided to remove this button when the Keeper’s responses appear and only have it present when the Fisherman has multiple lines of dialogue.