Mimic Hunt

Mimic Hunt is a work in progress, more informations soon...

Project Overview

Mimics have invaded the planet and they might be hiding inside the furnitures of your local neighbourhood... Hunt them down with your friends !

Mimic Hunt is an online FPS game in which up to 4 players have to communicate to spot monsters hidden inside furnitures, and kill them.

On this project, I'm taking care of User Research
My colleague Simon Ruiz is doing UX/UI Design

My Work

Determining the Target Audience

In a user-centred approach, determining the target audience is probably the most important step of the design process. This is why I started working on it immediately after the brainstorming phase, when we had a clearer idea of what we wanted to do and game references in mind.

Mimic Hunt is definitely inspired by the wave of cooperative first person games with proximity voice chat. Our main references are determined to be Lethal Company, Phasmophobia and GTFO. From this, I started doing extensive research by reading and collecting reviews on steam to get a grasp of tendencies. This is a method I really enjoy because it allows to collect a substancial amount of feedbacks about similar games from people willing to give some, because they took the time to write a review by themselves. I'm convinced it's a really cost efficient and interesting way to do user research.

From the hundreds of reviews I collected, I managed to extract tendencies, an summed them up in 3 "dimensions of experience" our target audience might be looking for :

  • Our target audience is looking to have fun with friends through communication. This is the social component of the experience.
  • They're expecting a horror experience, or at least something that will scare them, and they genuinely play for this aspect of the game.
  • We're aiming our game to mid and hardcore players, It's a fps and we want to create an experience for people who enjoy action, challenge and, ultimately, pushing their understanding of a game to the limit. This is exactly what GTFO does, and the game has been a huge success.
  • Hence, we can say, according to the Quantic Foundry's motivational model that the main motivators of our audience are the social aspect, thrilling action and a sense of mastery.

You might want to check out the whole process that led me to determine the target audience as it is. Click on the button below to access a document containing all the work I've done on it and that I've presented to the team. I end the document with open questions for me and game designers to answer during production as a whole.

Mimic Hunt's Target Audience

Art & concept by Florian Caron

First Playtest Session

In december, since we already had a playable game loop, we decided to organize the first playtest session to gather general feedback for the team. I find it really useful to iterate as quickly as possible on prototypes when it comes to playtests to help give the team directions. Hence, that's what we did.

Playtesting Mimic Hunt proved to be challenging, since it's an online game with proximity chat. I created a specific playtest protocol (which can be fond by clicking on the button below) and with the help of Timothée Bolla, the team's producer, we were able to set up two rooms inside of the school, with 2 participants each. We had 4 groups of 4 people who participated to the playtests, or 16 people in total who answered 20 questions.

This first playtest allowed me to tackle issues in the playtest protocol, the main one being that having 2 people in the same room created biases and problems for proximity communication. We plan to do another final playtest in january and this time, it will occur either remotely or in 4 different rooms if logisitics allows us to do so.

We were able to extract lots of data during this playtests which suggested for the most part that we were on the right track regarding our intentions and objectives. The main takeaway of this playtest was the fact that we could reinforce the scariness of the game, which felt underwhelming at the time of the test. We're currently adressing this issue by tweaking the behaviour of mimics, making them stronger and playing with light effects, event though we do not want the house to be completely in the dark by design.

Find in depth informations about the playtest and the way I set it up, collected data and reported it to the team by clicking the buttons below.

Protocol
Data
Report

More coming soon...

Mimic Hunt is an ongoing project.