For the user testing, I have asked a person outside of this class to test what I have so far. This includes the p5 screen only, as I was yet to have the physical part of the game and didn’t yet connect the Arduino to p5. On the p5 screen, there is an interactive board with pebbles distribution animation. The information about the order of turns, scores, and presence of any conquered pits is logged to the console and not yet displayed on the board. The turns are not timed yet.
The user was not given any instructions besides the p5 screen, so they navigated the game on their own. They have focused on using mouse clicks mainly, which correlates to the type of control that I had for p5 so far (players’ turns are played through mouse clicks on pits correlating to their side of the board). This observation indicates that it is only intuitive to want to interact with pits. I believe that the control will be even more intuitive when the physical aspect of the game will be built.
It could have been more effective if I asked two people to test the game instead of one because it is a two-player game. However, it could be observed that the user got a sense of it from the clear visual division of the board and the text from the console logs.
The tester was confused about the rules and the goal of the game. I believe that with well-written instructions, it would be an easy fix. My concern, however, is that people don’t like to read, especially when it comes to instructions. So if I make the instructions more than a few dozen of words long, people may skip through them, be confused through the game, and come to a conclusion that they don’t like it, when it’s actually very fun (like me with chess). I will try to add images where appropriate, however, I am not sure if images alone will suffice.
The video of the user testing is attached below. If the video window doesn’t show, use this link to view it.