Settling on a final idea to develop for the rest of the semester was no easy task. Narrowing from 80 ideas to 12, then from 12 to 3 went fairly smoothly. But the challenge of getting from 3 to 1, man that ended up being a knock down drag out battle of attrition. On the plus side, it wasn’t because any of the ideas were bad, in fact it was because all 3 ideas were so good, and people felt passionately about them all, that we had such a hard time choosing.
The first thing we did when we narrowed down to 3 ideas was to make lo-fi prototypes of all of them.
This helped us, as a team, better understand the 3 ideas, and communicate them to our advisors and client. When we showed them at our client meeting, however, we got very different responses. While they liked all 3 ideas a lot, our client liked “Black and White Town” the most, followed by “POV” then “Pause”, while our advisor felt the exact opposite. While we got valuable feedback on all 3 ideas, we weren’t any closer to making a decision. We went back and forth, discussing the various merits of all 3 ideas, but were unable to make any headway. We tried doing a straight up vote where people ranked the 3 choices, and Pause won with 7 votes to Black and White Town’s 5 and POV’s 3, however we felt it was still too close to make a decision. Eventually, our advisor sat down with us and forced us to at least eliminate one of the three. While some people on the team were still passionate about POV, it had the least support and ended up getting the boot.
The struggle to narrow it down from 2 to 1 may have been even harder. People argued passionately for both ideas, but it was clear we were getting nowhere. One technique we tried was coming up with design pillars to help us narrow down what exactly the project was all about, and what we hoped to get out of it.
While this was very helpful for the project overall, it didn’t really help us eliminate any ideas. Since we weren’t getting anywhere internally, we decided to look outside our team. We assembled a slide deck describing the two ideas, and included images we felt could serve as concept art.
At this point, the team had begun leaning more towards Pause, however, there was still enough support behind Black and White Town that we felt we weren’t ready to give up on it. And, when we showed it to people, Black and White Town was fairly uniformly what people preferred. That being the case, the team wasn’t ready to change its mind, and instead took it as a sign that we needed to to find a way to present Pause better. One major issue was actually the concept images, which many people thought represented our plans for the tone of the game, or even the gameplay. As a result, many people judged the games based on the images they liked more, while the images had only been meant as an afterthought, something to reinforce the meat of the ideas which we had previously outlined.
So, despite this last-minute support for Black and White Town, when the morning of Quarters arrived and we had to decide if we wanted to present both ideas or just one, we decided to go with our gut and just present Pause. Generally, this was regarded as the right move, as even faculty members who had previously supported Black and White Town liked Pause a lot more once we presented it differently. So, at the end of the day, what really helped us make the decision was going with our gut and choosing the idea that had the most passionate support behind it.