Thesis Project Week ???: Reset
After a long spell away due to sickness and personal issues I'm back to get this thing wrapped up. I was lucky enough to get a deferment for this assignment to allow me until the re submission date in August to get everything finished. I intended to have gotten back and completed things by now but sometimes you don't get to work on your terms but here we are.
I'm starting from the ground up first looking at my research question which as of my last work was going to be "Do instructional tutorials increase cognitive load on players when compared to tutorials delivered purely through discovery and environmental cues in 3D Platformers?" I was having a lot of trouble with this and resistance in terms of how I was going to really measure this and capture it in a game in any interesting way.
Critical Analysis of Original Question
|
Strength |
Testing Challenges |
|
Clear Comparison |
Cognitive load requires specialized tools (EEG, eye-tracking) or subjective surveys, complicating data collection with either option |
|
Relevant to platformers |
"Increase" implies binary outcome; doesn’t capture nuanced impacts |
|
Addresses core design tension |
Doesn’t specify which player behaviors manifest cognitive load |
So now I am coming back with the final research question: "To what extent do environmental diegetic tutorials foster greater perceived mastery and exploratory confidence versus directive tutorials in 3D platformer puzzles, despite potential initial efficiency penalties?"
Key Advantages for Testing New Question
- Investigates a non-obvious relationship:
- Does initial "struggle" with environmental tutorials lead to _better_ long-term outcomes?
- Measures meaningful player-centric outcomes:
- Perceived mastery (self-rated competence)
- Exploratory confidence (willingness to attempt sequence breaks)
- Aligns with industry debates:
- Directly challenges "efficiency-first" tutorial paradigms (e.g., Ubisoft's UI-heavy approach)
With some of that more heading thinking out of the way I'm aiming to get cracking at reworking the game from the state it is in to having the Alpha stages of the level for testing ready to go soon. When it is ready there will be a quick round of player testing to get any major bugs and issues out of the way. From there I will be tightening the design, adding some more visual and audio flare and then it will be on to testing for real and Beta submission.