Week 6: Clear Path

22 February, 2014

Hello friends!  This week was a very productive week for Team URSA.  Following Quarters and our last client meeting, we dug deep and pushed ourselves to create a solid game concept that we were all excited about and that also met the needs of the client.

Having chosen world hunger as central focus of our game, we focused all of our efforts this week on refining and defining the specific message about world hunger that we wanted to send to the players.  We came up with a few core statements about hunger and then designed game concepts that were inspired by these statements.

Following the advice gleaned from many meetings with various faculty members, we decided that the best design for a game for over 100 people to play outdoors would have to be simple and straightforward.  We met numerous times to iron out the details in our concept and to ensure that our message was clearly present in every element of our design.  The concepts that came from these meetings were simple and clear and we were ready to pitch them to our client.

Finally on Friday, we presented our game concepts to our advisors and our client.  The ideas were received well and we were given the green light to go ahead with production.  We as a team met and chose our favorite idea and then celebrated with some Bubble Tea!  Balancing the needs of the client, the faculty, and the team has been a difficult task, but it has been a rewarding process so far.

We also had process reviews with our team advisors this week.  Process reviews give us the opportunity to reflect on our self-assessment that we each completed at the beginning of the semester.  It also gives our advisors the opportunity to give us individual feedback.

Next week we will dive head first into production and begin prototyping the core of our game mechanic.  We are excited to see what the next few weeks will hold for us.

Week 5: Arrows

14 February, 2014

We started this week with our Quarters presentation to the faculty at the ETC.  During Quarters, the faculty visits each project room and each team presents the work they have done up to that point.  We presented the ideas that we had prepared to pitch to our client.  The faculty gave us so much great feedback.  Immediately following Quarters, our team met to interpret the feedback we received and see what feedback we could implement into our project.  It became clear to us that a few of our ideas just were not feasible or had too many restrictions.  But due to that feedback, we were able to focus in on what was feasible for our project, which pushed us forward in a new direction.

Early in the week, we heard back from our client.  She liked the social issues that we presented to her and gave us the green light to move forward with these issues.  Yan, our game designer, began coming up with new game ideas that were inspired by the approved social issue.

Thanks to the feedback from the faculty during Quarters, we decided that it would be more beneficial to use HTML5 and cell phones to implement our game.  This opened up our project schedule a bit more as we would not have to submit an app to the Apple App store.  Our programmers began researching ways to use HTML5 and tested the capabilities of HTML5 on a phone so that once we had a good idea that was based in the approved social issue, we could begin prototyping as soon as possible.

Our producers spent much of the week figuring the logistics of when and where exactly our game will be taking place during the Games for Change festival.  They also organized a meeting for us to reflect on how our team had been functioning over the last 5 weeks and to bring up ideas for how we could potentially do things differently.  This helped our team to refocus and keep moving forward.

Friday was a day full of meetings.  We first met with our advisors who were joined by Dave Culyba.  Dave provided us with very helpful advice on creating a game for a festival and specifically for the Games for Change festival.  Immediately following that, we had a conference call with our client.  From that call, we decided that the social issue we would design our game around would be World Hunger and the sub-issues contained within that.  We felt that as an issue, there was much more that we could pull from to create a truly meaningful game.  Later that day, we also met with Melanie Lam who helped us shape the way we are thinking about the project.  She also helped us to really define the space in which we are working to design this game.

Next week we plan to continue to investigate world hunger so that we can hit the ground running with prototyping and production, and we cannot wait!

Week 4: Refinement

7 February, 2014

As a team, we focused all of our efforts this week on refining our ideas for the project, refining our team’s branding, and preparing for our Quarter Presentations.

We started this week by meeting with faculty members both in the ETC and on main campus to gain some more insight into the development of a game about social issues.  We split our efforts so that half of the team met with Jessica Hammer, a new faculty member here at the ETC, and the other half met with Paolo Pedercini, a faculty member on main campus CMU.  Both of these meetings provided us with interesting insight into the development of games that deal with a social issue.  A few of us also went to the playtesting workshop put on by Jessica Hammer and Mike Christel.  This was very helpful in getting us thinking about the types of playtests we would need to set up this semester.  Later in the week, we met with Jesse Schell and discussed our project and current ideas with him.  He also gave us some very helpful advice.  All of these meetings inspired our team conversations and pushed us to work even harder.

Janet, Lisa, Tim, and Yan continued researching social issues.  We narrowed our research down to world hunger and economic inequality.  We spent hours going to various charity websites and reaching out to them.  The few charities that we did get into contact with, we asked what the core of the issue was and what challenges they, as a charity, were facing in trying to solve this issue.  This led to some very interesting insights and new perspectives that we were not aware of.  After our individual research, the four of us met and discussed what we had gleaned from our research and from calling charities.  From this discussion, we pulled out 3 one-sentence statements about the state of the issues we researched and brought them to the rest of the team.

Our programmers, Ken and Alex set up our Unity account.  Since our game will eventually be played by a large number of people, they prototyped a very basic network that could interact between devices.  Jack, along with the other artists, received critiques on the first draft of our team branding.  Following that, Jack continued to edit and refine our team’s logo, half sheet, and poster.  We also took our team picture.  Tim edited the photo, and it ended up being very silly.

We all came back together and produced a few new ideas, but also built upon the ideas we came up with last week.  At the end of the week, we presented these ideas to our advisors and our client.  The feedback was mixed, but we as a team felt that we found a direction that really inspired us.  We began preparations for our Quarter Presentation on Monday.  Next week we look forward to receiving feedback from the faculty during Quarters.  We also cannot wait to begin implementing our ideas!