Week 7: Finishing Touches + Recruiting Playtesters

Hello everyone! At the moment, I am working on the last few parts of my game before I can start playtesting and collecting data. 

The Softmax Function

In order to make my numerical suggestions make more sense to the players, I softmaxed the Q values from my AI policy, which makes them always sum to 1. This is a better indicator of their relative magnitudes to each other, as they behave much like percentages:

I’m also considering changing the numerical values to a bar graph, so that players can read the relative suggestion values more conveniently. The bar graph would also improve the appearance of the game UI.

Incoming UI Changes

This week, I met with my in-school advisor, Ms. Silva, to discuss potential UI improvements I could make to my game. I found her suggestions extremely helpful, especially from the perspective of someone who has been working on this project for months and has since forgotten how it might look to a playtester unfamiliar with the game. Such changes include:

1. Replacing the clock showing the remaining in-game time with a digital clock

2. Improving the appearance of the ambulance capacity meter

3. Rearranging the buttons and features to group them in a way that makes more sense

4. Replacing the humanoid images with better-quality ones made from Unity

Recruiting Playtesters

After I finish the UI improvements, I will begin playtesting. Throughout this week, I plan to recruit playtesters as I work on the UI. Though the prospect of recruiting enough people (30-60) worries me slightly, I hope that beginning recruitment early and potentially finding volunteers at school will help me create an appropriately sized sample pool. (By the way, if you’re reading this around 1-2 weeks after this has been published, and you’re interested in being a playtester, please contact me at mchlin2018@gmail.com). 

Thank you and see you next week!