Feedback (13th May)

The whole aim of this project and it’s experimental nature was to see whether this game based method of teaching was appropriate when it comes to teaching people about nature and how did it compare to traditional means of teaching such as videos and books when learning about wildlife.

Some of the questionnaire feedback:

Response from National Trust member

As you can see from the questionnaires that I have sent, people have definitely understood and grasped the purpose of the game and feel that it is an appropriate method of teaching people about nature. I Was also quite surprised that people thought the game has therapeutic implications as well, but can understand how someone could view the experience as therapeutic as it’s a very immersive and slow paced game.

The consensus for improvement from a lot of the responses was that some of the animals were to small, I have to agree with this as my initial approach was to make the species realistically scaled in the game, so creatures like the Blue Tit would be really small. As shown by the feedback this made seeing the species really difficult, so I went back into the game and made all the species more appropriately scaled for the purpose of the game.

Realistic size:

Game appropriate size:

Other really usefully feedback that I got from these questionnaires was that people would find it useful to have a map of some sorts in the game as they would get lost while playing. Unfortunately I won’t have time to add this feature into this game for the project deadline, though as this is environment is based off of a real location (North Melbury wood) if I was to continue this project a cool way to tackle the problem would be to have a birds eye view image of North Melbury wood (like on Google maps[1]) act as the map and have a simple key press to toggle it on and off. Along with this some people had issues navigating the trees and their colliders, as I am procedurally generating the trees to solve this issue I would have to mess around with the density of the forest, this is a very fiddly process and due to time restrictions unfortunately didn’t make it to the final game.

People also mentioned performance issues which I stated in my previous blog was hard for me to test, this is due to the fact that I have a computer that’s designed to handle high quality graphics so when I’m testing the game there’s no performance issues, though when someone with an average day-to-day laptop/computer tries this game it may suffer in it’s performance due to the vast amount of lighting calculations going on in scene. This is something that I must consider if I am planning on taking this game beyond this project, as due to the games wide target market it is likely that a large number of players will not have graphically powerfully computers. A way to test this would be to get access to another computer/laptop that isn’t built with graphics in mind and test the game on it frequently.

One of the the last improvements mentioned that I feel would really improve peoples experience was the addition of key mappings on screen. I need to be aware that a large number of people playing this game won’t be familiar with the WASD movement controls or familiar with gaming in general so adding something in like a small image in the corner showing the controls would be useful. This is definitely something that I would include if I was to take this project beyond this assignment, I didn’t manage to add this into the game as I didn’t want to just throw it in, I would want to make sure that it was polished and fit the screen appropriately without obstructing anything on screen.

Overall the purpose of this game/it’s experimental nature was to find out whether teaching people about nature in this was an effective method. As stated in my pitch document to test whether this was a success would be based on:

(Quote from my pitch document[2])

‘If 50%< give an average score 5 or more and if the majority of comments are positive in the survey then this experimental game will be classed as a success, proving this is an effective method of teaching about wildlife.’

As shown from the results this game and it’s educational purpose can be viewed as a success, clearly showing that people believe that this is an effective method of teaching people about wildlife. Though to get a more accurate set of results I would need more people test and feedback on the game, yet again this was a time restriction issue. Though to conclude I am very pleased with the results and it clearly shows that this game and method of teaching about nature has clear potential.

[1] Google, Google Maps 2005, Access at: https://www.google.com/maps

[2] Ben Nichols, Pitch Document, Personal collection

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