This week was a big one for us, since we had our quarters presentation, during which we would show several ETC faculty members exactly what we’d accomplish so far and get feedback. This was also the week when we transitioned from pure research and design to development.
Our quarters presentation was the first thing we did this week, for which we prepared a short albeit densely packed presentation and a prototype of the texting app for the game. The presentation was made to give faculty a brief introduction into what the board game version of The Poverty Spiral does and how we plan to transfer that to a virtual phone. The prototype played through one section of dialogue, focusing on one situation card for the elderly character, in which the player’s son was kicked out by his wife due to a drinking problem, and players would have to decide whether to take in their son or not. Some faculty liked our game, praising our concept and player interactions. Some faculty didn’t like the nonlinear dialogue, citing that sometimes they would personally say something other than the pre-written responses. Some faculty thought we set our scope to be too big, prompting us to scale down to a one day experience with three playable characters, instead of a three to four day experience with six playable characters.
Now that we have the opinions of many faculty members recorded, we have started the programming for the app. Most of the work done on that front this week was figuring out the overall architecture of the app, researching how best to send push notifications on different operating systems, scaling the UI for any screen size, system design, data storage, and basic interactions of messages in the texting app.
A design document is also in the works for our game, which is listing the different content and interactions of the game so far.
We’ve also started to write dialogue for one playable character’s story (the recent college graduate), mapping how different decisions would affect their finances, relationships, and health. The situation cards have also been organized into piles corresponding to which character will experience those situations in the app.
While all these parts of the game were started, we did end the week with one finished product, and that was the team picture, shown below.
We’ve learned a lot this week about where our product stands and in what direction it’s currently going, and while it’s going to take more meetings with various faculty to make sure we head in the best possible direction, we have high hopes that we’re laying the foundation for something that will help a lot of people’s stories be told for the first time.