Enhance

A story-driven mobile game about hard-working factory robot, climbing the ladder of success and showing off in instabot .

Role

Quality Assurance & User Research Manager

Team

Big Bool Games - 13 members -
(full names of team members in DADIU website.)

Date

November - December 2019

Download the game from google play store.

Enhance is a game about a lonely, non-advanced robot, Bucket, working in a factory, trying to make more money to get more upgrades to become more famous, work in better companies, and so on. While having a fast-paced gesture-based gameplay in the factory, there is another side to this robot world: Social Media with a chill scrolling mechanic! Instabot is where Bucket can meet other robots, follow their lives, and buy upgrades. As Bucket works more, becomes more advanced, and gets more followers to show-off for, it also goes through personality changes. We have to follow him till the end to see if this lifestyle suits him...

Enhance was made as a part of DADIU program in collaboration with 13 other students from different universities all over Denmark. This program is supposed to be a simulation of the real work environment teaching students how to work with different skills and backgrounds.

Enhance Trailer

Aside from being a part of concepting phase and initiation of story and game design as a lead team member my role was QA & UR manager.

User Research

During pre-production by doing Benchmarking, ZMET test, and Art user research I gathered different inspirations and ideas for different departments of the team.

But my most important duty was during production. Organizing external playtest sessions, analyzing & transferring the results, and (if possible) coming up with suggestions. My test sessions questionnaire was designed with a focused on Usability, Narration, and Appreciation. As I was the hub between players and the team I worked in close contact with the design team to first help the player understand the game and then make the experience more enjoyable by guiding the content to a direction that they like.

Some of the changes I influenced on were:

Adding lots of visual feedbacks both in instabot and factory.
Helping Instabot from being a confusing part of the game to a storytelling tool.
Suggesting a profile making scene for instabot to add more agency and be a tutorial to instabot.
Adding more posts and content in instabot and also bolding out Bucket's character arc.
And most importantly, insisting on keeping the story in the game based on playtest datas which showed that the factory game play isn't fun enough for the players and the game needed something more.`

Social Media Tutorial

Social Media Gameplay

Factory Gameplay

Quality Assurance

As a QA I made test plan and test cases for checking the bugs and a bug report Trello board for communicating within related departments (programmers, designers, artists).

Other than the technical bugs I also had an art reference for checking the assets and colors and Narration reference with all the social media feeds to check if the posts and upgrades appear in the right place.