Month: April 2018

[caption id="attachment_187" align="alignnone" width="800"] Openin'[/caption] This week was was part retrospective and part race towards the finish line. On Monday and Tuesday, we hosted members of the ETC faculty in our project room for "soft opening," which was our last chance to receive feedback before our upcoming final presentation. In addition to the now near-complete game experience, we were also able to show video footage from the post-game classroom discussion we captured last week. The faculty was able to witness the outline of transformational effects that the game is having, and we came out of the two days feeling confident in our design decisions and the work we've produced thus far. As of this writing, the game is technically complete in that it's playable from start to finish and can…

[caption id="attachment_147" align="alignnone" width="660"] Discussin'[/caption] The Prism train is hurtling towards the station and shows no sign of slowing down. While in real life this would result in a catastrophe of epic proportions for all involved, in the comfortable, imaginary space of this metaphor, it means we've got our collective nose to the grindstone and we're getting things done. Lots of things, actually. Above, you can see a brief preview of the classroom discussion that accompanies the game. We had a chance this week to watch and observe Mrs. Mills, the principal at Beech Bottom Primary, leading the school's 4th graders through a near-final version of this discussion. What we found will shock you. Nah, just kidding, it's all working pretty great. The kids are enthralled enough with the game…

[caption id="attachment_140" align="alignnone" width="660"] Rockin'[/caption] This week was a full-fledged assault on finishing the game. Although it's not quite done yet, all 3 major animal scenarios are now present and accounted for within the game. "The other side of the river" used to be an empty place not worth spending much time in, but as of today, you can meet such exciting creatures as the wild boar and the rabbit. It's nice to see the forest increasingly more populated. Deforestation might be a major issue the world faces in real life, but here in our fictional temperate paradise, it's only getting more lush. [caption id="attachment_142" align="alignnone" width="954"] He's not dead, we promise. He's just hurt and he needs your help![/caption] That's actually not entirely true. One of the issues we've…

[caption id="attachment_132" align="alignnone" width="660"] Breaking from tradition, there isn't a clever caption here—it's just a moose at a museum...a MOOSE-eum?? We're hoping to put a moose in our game. Somebody take the blog controls away from me, please. [/caption] Alas, week 11, you're gone already and we hardly knew ye.  With only a few weeks left in the semester, the team has been buckling down to incorporate the feedback we received from last week's presentations and playtesting, as well as to finish implementing the remaining animal scenarios in the story. First, we completely overhauled the game map. There is a more cohesive design to the forest now that will be much easier to navigate. The river is now both central to the story and to the forest itself; it literally bisects the…