Our team started a further discussion about details we didn’t cover last week, including game mechanic, and even level design.

Relationship

Help situation:

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Our team started the third week with signing a team motto and putting it up in our project room. Our motto is:

To make the players realize  something about themselves, that is, to have an epiphany.

Below our primary motto, we listed several secondary goals:

– Creating an engaging game

– Creating a unique game

– Having meaningful mechanics

– Guide the players subtlety

We are getting closer to what we want in an expressive game.

Progress

On Monday, we narrowed down our wide open ideas to four themes that the team was most interested in. They were Theseus’s paradox, work-life balance, relationship, and trust.

In order to bring new perspectives to our concept design, our team applied top-down brainstorming methods in the next two days. We started with blue sky brainstorming based on each theme. We put aside our previous game mechanic ideas and expanded on the facets of each theme and scenarios to express each facet. Each scenario should be able to serve our project motto. This kept us on the right track of focusing on meaningful game design. (more…)

This week was about defining the boundaries of our project. We met with our client, defined the meaning of “expressive games,” and brainstormed several ideas for meaningful games.

Progress

Our programmers, Albert, Kiran and Xiao, dived into the research about the capabailties of Ouya’s hardware. Early this week, they developed a goldspike with controller input that ran on the Ouya successfully. Xiao and Kiran gave presentations within the team on Wednesday, covering the Ouya’s features and the limits of its capabilities. On Wednesday afternoon, our team had the first meeting with our client, Paolo Pedercini. Paolo shared his opinion about expressive/experimental games and what they meant to him. In the future, we will have weekly meetings with Paolo.

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Hello, everyone!

We are Team Epiphany at Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University. In this fall semester, we are going to develop a polished expressive game on OUYA, a microconsole running on Android operating system.

Progress

In our inaugural week, we have been figuring out our groove and the effective way to work as a team. Our first team meeting happened on the very first day of this semester, each of us was passionate about our project and looking forward to making a successful game in the following 15 weeks. We established team roles, and shared ideas about the definition of expressive games. In order to innovate beyond what’s already been done, we made some research on games published on OUYA and discussed about the specialties of Ouya.

Everyone shaking their phones to join the Epiphany WeChat Group

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