Hi all, last year, we had a good opportunity to do some usability work on Crawl. These were student works from University of Oulu (Information Processing Science department) where I and Janne study. There was the UP team, which was a project course, where we did heuristic evaluation and user testing on the game (pre-0.6 at that point), and finally redesigned the tutorial. But there was also the team Warwalrus, who also did heuristic evaluation and user testing, focusing more on the then-tutorial, now-hints mode, specifically the caster tutorial.
The Warwalrus team was doing an usability testing course. The results of that testing were interesting (the specifically had testers that hadn't player roguelikes before, which affected the expectations and user experience of the testers) but unfortunately the final report is still stuck with me - it was written in Finnish and I still have the important parts untranslated. I plan to finish that soon - much of it pretty much confirms UP team findings, but there are some interesting points that didn't surface within the UP team work. Anyway! We again have a chance to get a team on the usability testing course this year, and they'll do in-team heuristic evaluation and then user testing with testers who haven't seen Crawl before. So, we need to decide what we want tested. We need a short description, that includes: what is to be tested, who tests (what is our target audience), and what is the goal of the testing. The description is due Wednesday, so I thought I'd send the following tomorrow morning: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a single-player, role-playing roguelike game of exploration and treasure-hunting in dungeons filled with dangerous and unfriendly monsters in a quest to rescue the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot. The game is developed by a large (20+) multinational volunteer team as an open source project since 2006 and is a variant of the original Linley's Dungeon Crawl, first released in 1997. The target of the testing is the new tutorial mode, developed in Spring 2010 during a Project 1 course in the Information Processing Science department of Oulu University. The testers should be gamers, who have not played roguelike games (such as Nethack, ADOM, Angband and Crawl itself) before. The goal of the testing is to assess how well the new tutorial works. The previous tutorial was tested in 2010 in the Project 1 and the Usability Testing courses. We can compare results of those tests to the new ones and see if the learnability (and also general usability) of the game has improved during the year. Additional requirements: all reports and other material that is delivered to the Stone Soup project should be in English. Due to the open development nature of the game, the report will be published in its wiki. --- Now, we can change the requirements afterwards (that's not uncommon in the industry, right :P) but I think we agree that the tutorial is a good target for testing. It was developed based on previous year's testing, but not tested rigorously in itself. So it would be interesting and probably beneficial too. I was thinking of suggesting that the structure of the testing be: have the tester find and start the tutorial, complete it, and with the remaining time play the regular game (or hints mode, or whatever the tester wants). This way we can probably see if the things tutorial teaches the player translates to actual game-playing skills. Thoughts, comments? Sorry for the long mail. :) --Eino ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gaining the trust of online customers is vital for the success of any company that requires sensitive data to be transmitted over the Web. Learn how to best implement a security strategy that keeps consumers' information secure and instills the confidence they need to proceed with transactions. http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl _______________________________________________ Crawl-ref-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crawl-ref-discuss
