So while the HCII will continue working on our game and studying it, we’d love for you to take a look at our final product for the semester: Pause.

After making changes based on our Playtest Day feedback, we felt we were very close to having a complete, final product for Softs.  However, we also understood that our game and our goals were still a little confusing, so we also spent some time putting together a presentation that would hopefully make it clearer.  As it turned […]

Between week 11 and 12 was playtest day.  Going into it, we had two main things we were testing for: Are our metaphors making an emotional impact, and are players making the connection to disasters.  After testing, it seemed like the answer to both was “no”, however through the process we learned a ton about where […]

So up through Week 10, our blog posts have been “Producer Reflections”.  This is because our client, the CMU Human Computer Interaction Institute, wanted specific information on our process and our thoughts about the project.  Hopefully this has been helpful to them, but now I’d like to take some time to give a more general overview […]

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 […]

As we were working hard to produce another batch of of puzzles for our game, it was also time for us to begin testing what he had already.  We knew from the start that our idea would be tough to test, as the full emotional impact of the game won’t be known until all the […]

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, […]

The blog posts for week 4 and 5 coming together like this was somewhat by accident, but they actually relate quite well.  In week 4, we actually didn’t do much additional research, we were more focused on narrowing down our ideas for Quarters.  We figured by having one concrete idea to present instead of 2 […]

This week, our task was to reduce our list of 80+ ideas into a more manageable 12.  The idea was that this list would consist of our top 3 ideas from each of the 4 belief change strategies (Reflection, Cognitive Dissonance, Identification with a Character, and Metaphor).  To do this, we began by each of us […]

This week was focused on ideation in a very serious way.  Our goal was to come up with 80 game ideas by the end of the week, with each of the ideas fitting in to one of four strategies for changing people’s beliefs.  The four strategies were: Identification with Character (using a character the player […]