Somniphobia
(User Research)
Overview
Project Type: Single Player Horror Game | Team Size: 10 people | Duration: Sept 2023 - April 2024 | Software: Unreal Engine 5.2
Somniphobia is a fixed-camera survival horror rogue-lite in which the player is trapped in a never-ending nightmare and must break the cycle. The game was developed in Unreal 5.2 with a team of 10 people, including 3 designers and 7 programmers. I was the Lead Level Designer and User Researcher on the project.
For this page, I will focus on my experience holding a focus group for the project.
User Research Responsibilities
As a user researcher on this project, I had tasked myself with holding the team’s playtests and completing a focus group. I had chosen a focus group specifically to help determine how players gave feedback within a group context. The end product was a written report that I gave back to my team.
Planning the Focus Group
The first stages of my focus group started with the 5 questions of testing: What, Where, Who, Why, and How. When is also important to note here, but I will not be going over it.
What are we testing? We are testing our game Somniphobia in it’s current state (at the time).
Where are we testing? The focus group will be held at DigiPen Campus in our current team space.
Who are we testing? We are testing three other DigiPen students who were interested in the game.
Why are we testing? The team wants feedback on the current state of the game as a whole.
How are we testing the game? Players are going to use three development machines to play the most current build. Then after they have given consent that they are done, we will interview them together.
Focus Group Testing
When going into the test, I always have a set of questions prepared beforehand to ask participants. For testing our game, it was important for me to build a player persona. I asked them what games they like to play and how often they play. This helps the team filter the data under the lens of the participant. If the participant fits within the player persona the game is appealing to, they might have biased responses.
When getting to the test itself, I had to factor in ethics first and foremost. Do participants know how long this is going to take? What information is going to be withheld from them? Do they know they can quit at any time. All of these considerations were made known to the participants before the test within the consent form, as our goal was not to test anything within the game specifically. The main segment of the consent form can be seen to the left.
For the focus group, our goal was to get observational data by watching participants play the game all at the same time. This requires a hands-off approach where we scarcely talked to participants. During the test, we ran into complications where players encountered bugs and soft-locked themselves. The note taker and I had to step in to help guide players to a state where they could play again if they wished to.
After the initial game-playing phase, we interviewed each participant 1 by 1 within the same space to let them each have a say about their opinions on the game. Once these were through, we asked a few questions about specific experiences they had in game. We encouraged the participants to build off what each other said. This was all to help get a group mindset that we could only foster within the focus session.
Writing the Report
When it got to writing the report, I divided it into 5 sections: Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Findings, and Discussion. For myself, writing the report tends to be the easy part, as I follow a report structure.
Abstract: I go over the entire paper within a paragraph or two to summarize for people who might have to skim through.
Introduction: I give a background on what we are testing and why we are testing.
Methodology: I talked about how we are testing things including procedures, ethics considerations, where, and when we are testing.
Findings: I present the results of the test as they are. I only talk about what we found in this section. I also use data visualization to help present the findings.
Discussion: I talk to the team about the findings and how they can affect how we develop the game.
You can download the research report itself here.
Postmortem
The main thing I would have done better on this project was holding the focus group itself. Having bugs for an in-development game is nothing new, but we ended up having to pivot slightly due to these bugs. While this did not take away from the data we had gathered, it ended up requiring us to step in and interrupt the flow of the players enjoyment.