We started brain-storming on our ideas in this week. Kicking off the week with Labour Day, we were on a Skype call from our respective locations. Our discussions led to the primary focus of the project which was revolved around networking. This was something we learnt from the client meeting as they are looking for a scalable game and can also support multiple people. The general idea about Unity and its networking capabilities were floated around. We even talked to the River Run (past ETC project) to figure out how they had gone ahead with the network setup. They told us about the challenges they had faced while getting a multiplayer game in place. This is something we’ll have to keep in mind, going forward.

We started working on the project website and updated the same with what we had done during the first week. After which, a large part of this week was spent of brainstorming new ideas for the semester. All 4 of us went and brought 10 ideas to the table and we had a long discussion about what each idea could be expanded into.

The discussion included what to take from each idea. Few ideas were game mechanics, complete games itself, gaming setting / themes to name a few. This has collaborated into an inspiration board from which we can create a pitch for the client. The importance of the brainstorming process was that we made sure we did not restrict ourselves in terms of technology or any other form of boundaries. Game pitches varied from physical games to digital games to pen and paper based games. It was important to undergo this process so that we could combine mechanics and ideas from different media and use it for our final wholesome experience.

Once we had a better picture of our brainstorming session, we invited Mike Christel who gave us valuable feedback about the ideas we had and also pointed us towards other resources and past ETC projects that were in the same space as our current project.

The week was extremely useful in getting together multiple game design ideas and also to combine them to make our final 3 pitches for the client. The next week will involve narrowing down these ideas into more concrete games pitches and we will be presenting them to the client on Tuesday. Hope they like one of them and we get to start building a prototype for the same.