70 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
70 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
# Playtest Analysis — Session 0732452b
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Date: 2026-08-16
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Source log: `JSONL/conversion-breach-0732452b-3ce4-4329-aa69-b121180c61a8.jsonl`
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## Observed Behavior
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- Total logged duration: 970 seconds (about 16 minutes 10 seconds).
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- Breach events span about 14 minutes 23 seconds across two breach segments.
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- The player reached wave 11 and cleared ten complete waves.
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- 74 constructs were destroyed in Breach.
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- 67 kinetic discharges affected an average of 1.66 constructs; none affected zero targets.
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- 184 tether sessions: 139 extraction and 45 injection.
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- 25 tether sessions lasted under 150 ms, consistent with at least some control interruption or accidental taps; the log cannot prove the cause.
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- 80 thermal-state transitions, including 33 entries into brittle and only two into unstable.
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- Only one unstable release occurred.
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- 69 of 74 destroys came from wall impacts. Five came from construct collisions.
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- 19 player-damage events occurred. Thirteen were in the first logged Breach wave; only six occurred across later waves. Minimum recorded health was 22.
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- Reservoir was below 5 in 42 of 150 Breach snapshots (28%). Mean snapshot reservoir was 47.5, but later capacity upgrades inflate that mean.
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- 24 calibration choices: 19 conversion, four capacity, one transfer.
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- Final calibration values were capacity 240, transfer 35.1, conversion 85.071. Multiplicative conversion scaling became extreme.
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## Player Report
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- Calm was perceived as a sandbox/tutorial rather than a test and was left quickly for Breach.
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- Breach remained interesting for an estimated 5–10 minutes; the log shows longer engagement.
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- Trackpad palm rejection made keyboard-plus-pointer controls poor during this run. The player subsequently obtained a mouse, so this should not be treated as a central cause in the next comparison.
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- Initial tactic: extract as much heat as possible, then blast.
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- Revised tactic: avoid leaving the final enemy brittle and depleted unless already positioned for an immediate wall blast.
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- Capacity felt unhelpful; transfer already felt fast; most upgrades went to conversion.
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- The player tried to ram constructs after perceiving possible collision damage, but could not understand or safely reproduce it.
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- Extracting through a wall felt too safe.
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- Crowded constructs appeared to phase through walls.
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- Full-screen layout hid instructions and/or part of the field; the player could not confidently scroll. A narrower window appeared to fit better.
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## Important Model Mismatch
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The implementation multiplies brittle collision damage by 13. Brittle targets do not take less collision damage. The reported difficulty killing a final brittle target is more plausibly a resource-state problem: extraction removed the target's heat, the player reservoir was empty, and no other enemy remained as fuel. Cooling also reduced pursuit speed, which could make arranging an unpowered collision harder.
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Do not “correct” the player report as if their experience were invalid. The mismatch is evidence that the causal feedback did not clearly distinguish toughness from lack of available impulse.
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Player ramming did not deal construct damage in the implementation. The player nevertheless formed and tested that hypothesis from observed collision behavior. This is positive voluntary-experiment evidence, while the inability to read the result is a feedback/affordance failure.
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## What This Supports
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- A coupled tradeoff produced real adaptation: extracting heat both funded attacks and changed the remaining target/resource state.
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- Practical stakes and/or wave progression provided incentive absent from Experiments 000 and 001.
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- The player chose upgrades instrumentally around the perceived bottleneck rather than distributing them evenly.
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- Knowledge and power both increased: later waves generally produced few player hits and many were cleared much faster.
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- Visible physical laws generated at least one unrequired hypothesis (ramming).
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## What This Does Not Establish
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- Pressure was not isolated. Calm lacked continuing waves/progression and looked like a testing room.
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- Direct control was not isolated from action feedback, wave goals, upgrades, escalating power, and enemies.
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- The property system may still be shallow. Wall blasts dominated, brittle was common, unstable behavior was nearly absent, and conversion upgrades overwhelmed other choices.
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- Later safety may reflect learning, exponential power, through-wall extraction, collision bugs, or their combination.
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- Continued play may have been driven by wave progression/power accumulation rather than curiosity about laws.
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## Corrective Work Before Further Comparison
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- Make Calm a complete wave/calibration variant differing only in pursuit and player damage.
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- Clearly label Calm and Breach as two full experimental variants.
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- Add pointer-only movement and thermal-mode controls; add Space as an alternate discharge input. Retain these as general accessibility/readability improvements, but do not center the next test on trackpad friction because the player now has a mouse.
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- Make the entire field and instructions fit a full-screen viewport, with unmistakable scrolling where needed and resize telemetry.
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- Block tethering through obstacles.
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- Strengthen obstacle collision resolution to prevent clustered phasing.
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- Improve feedback that separates low target heat, low player reservoir, target integrity, and actual impact damage.
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- Preserve the current playtest build's result before using corrected behavior as new evidence.
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