User Experience Improvements (Donovan's Week 5 Update)

For this week, I scouted many of my friends to be user testers of our Visual Novel. 5 volunteered and played the entirety of chapter 1. They are to give feedback on what they think of the dialogues, pacing, atmosphere and other qualities that make their experience either fun or boring. Before they began they playtesting, I added some music into the scenes that were provided by the software.

Majority of them said they instantly relate to the characters and are able to understand the atmosphere in certain scenes. A small minority, however, critiqued that some dialogues seem a little off. Additionally, they encountered some bugs on certain scenes looping. A certain friend of mine complained about the right click bringing up the pause menu while the spacebar not being able to show the next message of a dialogue and that is mildly frustrating for him.

I took into consideration the negative feedbacks and greatly improved the user experience to now allow spacebar to show the next messages while disabling the right-click menu. Additionally, I decided to try scouting for music with free licenses to better enhance the emotions and hit the right moods. Music scouting is a low priority right now as I want to quickly work on the User Interface elements.

Next week, I plan to create the elements of User Interface like the message box and other elements.

04/10/2019

- Donovan Ng

When Senpai help to playtest your visual novel.