Glowing Garden
A casual, cozy game created by Active Duck Studios about bringing light and life back into a dying world.
Help the newly sprouted mushroom sprite Mico on his mission to restore the balance of magic in his world. Drill into the earth, collect and absorb latent magical energy, and expend that energy to grow new mushroom friends when you return to the surface.
Project Background
This project was created as part of the Games and Playable Media MS program at UC Santa Cruz. I worked with a team of 4 other multidiciplinary devs for 10 months to bring this project to life.
My Contributions
As my team’s UX Researcher most of my responsibilities were research and playtest oriented. These included:
Organizing and executing weekly playtests
Logging notable play tester behaviors (notable struggles, moments of enjoyment, and general comments) via a spreadsheet
Organizing recorded data for readability
Discovering common pain points and moments of triumph among recorded data
Presenting my findings at the start of each weekly sprint
Divising the best actions to take for the current week to maximize player enjoyment
My Impact & What I learned
My Impact
My findings directly influenced what the team prioritized on a weekly basis, as my research gave concrete data for how players were reacting to our new systems. My suggested changes and guidance helped us focus on improving player satisfaction.
Additionally, my research and insights resulted in a 20% increase in player enjoyment of our game over the course of production.
What I learned:
How to prepare for and adapt to sudden project cancellations
The importance of resilience and flexibility when dealing with sudden project changes
How to spot inefficiencies in playtest structure
Strategies for iterating on playtest structures & methods without sacrificing data quality
Samples of my work conducted on this project, along with links to full documents are included in the following sections
Data Collection & Analysis
Playtest Data Collection and Analysis
After every weekly playtest I sorted my findings into a google sheet to share with the team. As part of this, I:
Sorted all playback feedback into 4 areas: Praise, Friction, Interesting Suggestions, and Unique Behaviors.
Seperated prioritizing key data in its own sheet and archiving irrelevant feedback
Color coded the 4 types of responses for visual clarity and readability
Turned pain points and frustrations into actionable production decisions for the following week
Shared all notable findings and suggestions at our weekly stand up meeting
A sample of our core playtest spreadsheet along with a link to the full sheet are included here.
At our weekly stand ups I made sure to center most of my post playtest result briefing on praise, as I know it’s a great motivator for teams. Even wehn we had negative sessions I made sure to highlight what praise we recieved, no matter how small, so that we could enter the next week motivated and encouraged.
Spreadsheet Color Key
Core Spreadsheet - Samples
Playtest Planning & Organization
The brief and debrief script
Due to the quick turnaround time and fast pace of our Masters Program I was conducting 2-4 playtests a week to assess the state and enjoyment of our game. To accurately gather enough useful data for production, I did the following:
Met with the team lead to clarify our week’s research goals
Edited the briefing script to match our weekly goals
Created a reuseable, moddable template for post test survey questions that could be adjusted for our weekly research goals
Eventually we stopped utilizing the recruitment form due to securing a regular bathch of testers. Additionally, the post test survey was eventually dropped to focus on interview quesiton and test footage analysis.
A copy of a mid production playtest script is displayed in this section.
