Greetings! We’re Alice’s Adventure, and this semester we’ll be making an adventure game creation tool to help kids make their first ever video game, but with the head-fake of learning computer science principles. The first point of discussion this week was the roles each of us are taking for the project, which are:
Jeremy Liu : Designer
Miao Ren: Programmer
Ruili Tang: Programmer
Sophie Kim: Artist & UI/UX
Tianyi Zhao: Programmer
Vasant Menon: Designer & Producer
After much discussion, we arrived at Alice’s Adventure as the team name, as it clears the motives of the project quite well. Our instructors for the project are ETC faculty Dave Culyba and Ruth Comely, who we met with over the introductory week. They advised us to do our research, well, by playing adventure games! It was a good idea as we sat down as a team and made a composition box, outlining the resources we should take inspiration from, what kind of product we want to create, and what needs we are solving for our target audience. We presented our composition box at the Playtest To Explore Workshop and improved upon our ideas too.
The rest of the week we spent in a cycle of research and meetings. We each assigned ourselves an adventure game to analyse or a tool to study, used/played it the whole day and the next day met up to together talk about what we learnt and some of the interesting points we think should be kept in mind when we start building the product. We compiled all of our results and Sophie made a cool slide deck that we presented to Eric Brown, Director of Alice and also our client, with good feedback. Next week we start implementing some of this and looking more into the engine side of things and outlining how the rest of the semester would go, week by week. So see you then!