Producer Reflection – Week 9 and 10

Week 9 was rather uneventful, given that the majority of our team was away at SXSW and GDC.  Those that remained at the ETC continued working on adding additional gameplay features and finalized our build for Halves.  Fortunately, we had finished the majority of the presentation before we broke for Spring Break, so we were ready to hit the ground running when we got back.  In terms of our presentation, there were a few key areas we wanted to focus on.  First, we wanted to make sure we explained the goals of the project, as it is a somewhat unusual mix of exploration and delivery.  Second, we felt the research and brainstorming process we went through was important, as not only did it lead to our current idea, it was also an important part of what our client wanted to study.  Third, we also felt it was important to show our game, as it’s a very hard concept to describe.  Finally we wanted to discuss our plans for playtesting and responding to feedback, in order to show we had a plan for moving forward.

SurThrive Halves

There were plenty of concerns regarding the faculty understanding our project.  First, in what we had made, there weren’t many direct ties to disasters.  We wanted to make it clear in our presentation that our project was indeed about disasters, and the relationship would become clearer as we added more content.  Another concern was that they wouldn’t get the metaphor angle.  Again, with the build in the state it was in, it wasn’t immediately obvious how our game would make use of metaphors, so we made sure we spent a lot of time discussing it, and even prepared an extra slide at the end in case people asked questions about it.

SurThrive Halves (1)

In the end, those concerns turned out to be well-founded.  Despite explaining our intended use of metaphors, and fielding a question about it during the Q & A, the faculty felt they still didn’t understand how our project used metaphors.  Similarly, even though we led off the presentation talking about disasters, they didn’t see how it was connected to our project.  Both of these are understandable, as we hadn’t begun adding disaster-specific content, and without it it’s hard to see how exactly our project will leverage metaphors.  What was more surprising was how the faculty reacted to the presentation itself.  While nobody pointed out any major flaws with it, a series of minor mistakes, misstatements, and questionable content served to distract the faculty from the core of our presentation.

SurThrive Halves (2)

The problems apparently started from the beginning.  We began by showing a video, but it started a few seconds too early.  This overlapped with the speaker onstage, which apparently caused the audience to miss its importance.  There were also clips from Hollywood movies mixed in with actual disaster footage, which was a distraction.  In describing our discussion of metaphors, faculty objected to our tone, saying we came off as arrogant. Other faculty members objected to our statement that the media was the cause of people having warped views of disasters.  However the biggest blow against us was apparently when we showed our demo.  In the past, we’d received feedback that our bowlhead characters looked… somewhat phallic.  It was a problem we were planning on addressing, but something we figured could wait until after Halves.  Apparently, faculty picked up on it right away, and had a hard time taking our presentation seriously after that.

SurThrive Halves (3)

This was a huge lesson in testing your presentation thoroughly, with a few different audiences.  While we rehearsed and polished our slides, we perhaps didn’t get enough outside input on our content, and how we were presenting it.  That being said, we received a lot of valuable feedback about our project, aside from the feedback on the presentation itself.  We definitely want to start adding more disaster-specific content, both to make the connection to disasters clearer as well as to give us a chance to use our metaphors.  We also will put more of an emphasis on gathering data and hard numbers for our final presentation, as that was another complaint we received.  Overall, this feedback has caused us to take a step back and assess the direction we’re going.  We’ve realized we need a clearer picture of how we’re connecting disaster, metaphor, and the gameplay of our project.  We also want to have a more directed focus as to how all these things will help our client achieve their goals.