In week 2, we mainly focused on understanding the client’s request and the format of our product.
We firstly had a meeting with our client Jessica Hammer. Our advisor Dave and Heather also attended. During the meeting, we got to know each other and exchanged useful information. We got a clearer and more structured idea of what we are making:
We are going to make an activity around 10 minutes in a 4-5 hours role-playing game, which could be played 3-5 times.
The whole experience is about the stories of women who worked at The Bletchley Park during World War 2. The players will take roles and play as them not only during but also after the war. They will play different roles that in the story has different skills and talent. They will feel the moment they successfully break the code of German Army, which is heroic and magnificent, and the moments after the war that life pulled them far away from their success and merit, which is tragically touching.
The part we are building in this experience is the activity in which the players break the code, or make good use of their intelligence, feel smart heroic and changed or saved the world. It might connect with the whole experience to build the emotion change from “contribute to the most important part to the triumph in WW2” to “forced to hide talent and secrets, not credited”. The whole experience will be designed parallel to our design through the semester, so the details might shift in the future.
We did two assignments Jessica gave us. The first is to play the game “Model Protectorate”, one of the recent games she and her colleague (who’s also our client this time) Moyra made. It’s an example of the whole experience. We played it and tried to understand the mechanics working in it.
Role Playing!
Special thanks to Alan Turner who joined and helped us in an improv scene!
The second assignment is to watch a TV show The Bletchley Circle. It’s a show tells the story in the 1950s of 4 women who worked at Bletchley Park were friends. This show really helped us get ideas of how can we build fictional characters, and especially how their personal characteristics can also affect the story.
Snacks are important!
Too loud?
Watching on another day…
In the rest of the week, we started to do some research. We also set up a session to discuss all of our feedbacks about the game and the show. After the session, we separated and did more individual research on the core mechanic, and our designers came up with a method to build prototypes.
We also had a short talk with professor Jesse Schell, he gave us some great suggestions and inspirations. He also provided us some references and books.
Our plan next week is mainly to figure out the possible content of different aspects of this activity, including roles, puzzles, and so on. Ideally, we can make one rough prototype of the game process. We will also work on project branding.
