Month: March 2019

While the past few weeks were all about combining the work that had been done by different teams and people into one fully-functioning game, week nine saw Team Fortitude working on a more individual basis again as we worked to develop more content. Let’s take a look at what they did this week.

The game didn’t see any major design changes, though since the designers thought the game could use more emotional impact, they decided to include an extra conversation for each profile with someone who doesn’t understand their situation and says something ignorant that undermines all the work the player has done in the game. We hope that this conversation will help the player feel how hurtful the misunderstandings towards people in poverty can be, put them into the role of defending those in poverty, and create a cathartic experience for any players who perhaps experienced something similar in real life, but felt like they couldn’t react how they wanted to without damaging their relationship or reputation. The design team also spent some time (finally) playing This War Of Mine. In the game, Pavle may have died, but the design team’s sense of inspiration has not. We noticed that This War Of Mine really made the players care about the characters by providing minute details from their lives to make them seem more real, and by communicating that anyone could have fallen into a situation like the one in the game, regardless of personal prowess. We hope to carry this into Broke. One way we talked about doing this was making the homeless character act like an intellectual. Our client confirmed this happens. She told us about finding Harvard alumni in homeless shelters, sabotaged by mental ailments, just like the homeless character in Broke. We also think that adding characterization to the playable characters will help separate the player from them, which will counter a problem we’ve had with players reacting to the choices they may make with statements along the lines of, “I wouldn’t do those options; I would do a third option that isn’t available in the game.” We’ve been writing dialogue for the homeless character with that in mind this week.

Meanwhile, the tech team has been taking steps to include data saving capabilities. The database has been modified to be writable, thus allowing data to be saved directly to the database. Data restoration has also been worked on, so that when users open the app, it will display the restored progress for them. More work has also been done on the bank app, namely in how the UI is arranged and scaled. Work has also been done into organizing the cluster system through which content is presented to the player.

The art team has mainly been designing the layout of the bank app and working out the logo and intro for the game.

This was our last week before spring break. Will we come back energized and ready to dump out massive amounts of content, or will we be somehow more tired than before? You’ll find out next time. See you soon!

How could one week of an ETC project be both one of the least development intensive AND one of the most high stakes? It’s halves week, of course! Let’s get into how that went for Team Fortitude.

We started this week with the “World’s Crappiest Slide Deck,” as per our advisers’ advice (every slide was just a title and an empty void), and worked this week to encapsulate eight weeks of work into 15 minutes of power point presentations. We summarized our design, tech, and art work, as well as going over our plans for the future. In addition to preparing our presentation, we prepared a few bonus slides that we would refer to that didn’t encapsulate the most important parts of our project, but might come up in the questions period. Our final presentation can be found here.

Overall, our presentation went quite smoothly. We presented with poise and thorough knowledge of the topics, and knew the answers to all the questions that were asked of us. We even got to use one of our bonus slides to answer a question.

Once the presentation was over, the team took time to wind down, reflect, and plan our next steps. The design team focused on finding a way to portray GoFundMe in a way that makes it more clear that it’s meant to be an indicator of relationships. The team’s leading idea is to invent a new in-game app to replace GoFundMe, called Team. Team is a social networking/crowdfunding app made to give users direct access to their support network of the people in their lives they trust the most. A user’s team is a small group of people containing everyone the user is willing to turn to in their darkest hours. They post on Team when they’re having problems too personal for the likes of Facebook or other social media where any post could be seen by any random acquaintance. The frequency of posts on Team is restricted to make sure the impact of any given user posting on Team is strong. Once a user posts on Team, everyone on their team can see it and offer help and support, be that monetary, emotional, or otherwise. Within Broke, players have the option to post on Team at the very end of the game, asking for help from their team to reach stability. Throughout the game, other characters will join and leave the player’s team in the same way that they’d donate to or retract donations from the player’s GoFundMe. The difference is essentially that the player’s team doesn’t have a dollar amount next to it, since the amount of money the team will produce will not be revealed until the very end of the game, since that’s the only time that the player can ask them for help. We help this will serve both as a social indicator and a demonstration of the strength of cooperation among people in poverty that often exists in real life. Team Fortitude is in favor of this idea, but it still needs to be pitched to our advisers and client.

Going into the second and final half of our project, we know there’s a lot of work and difficult decisions ahead of us (just like there will be for the players of Broke), but we’re ready to take it on and see what the future holds.

This week, our final week before halves, focused heavily on connections. This included both connecting the various parts of the project that the programmers have produced and connecting with others to help us playtest the texting app.

There weren’t any noticeably large design changes this week, though we conducted a lot of playtesting in order to figure out whether or not GoFundMe resonated with players as an indicator of the social standing of their character. We at first decided to go to playtesting night as per usual, but due to low attendance at playtest night, we couldn’t get the data we wanted. We decided instead to test with our classmates and faculty members at the ETC, conducting a total of 12 playtests on Friday. Unfortunately, the symbolism of GoFundMe did not seem to transfer over to the playtesters; instead of seeing it as a social indicator, they saw it as a second financial indicator, albeit a more abstract one. The design team is still discussing whether they will change the appearance of GoFundMe to make it appear more of a social indicator, or if they will instead embrace the way players currently see it and design based off of that.

Other things we learned from playtesting are as follows:

• Players originally didn’t notice that their text conversation had an impact on the GoFundMe, but a simple notification changed that.
• People have very different ideas about how to create a successful GoFundMe campaign, and most admit they would be unsure how to run a good one.
• The situation we tested was one where players had the choice to store undisclosed (presumably suspicious) items belonging to an old friend of theirs for $100 a week or not. 11 of the 12 players chose not to store the items, and were disappointed that they lost a friend in making that choice, but didn’t care deeply due to lack of knowledge of the strength of that relationship beforehand. We plan on fixing this by having the old friend reference an inside joke between the two characters before they present their situation.
• Some people felt uncomfortable making a final decision without getting more information about what the items to be stored were.
• Some people praised the interaction system and how realistic the diction felt.

Aside from responding to this feedback, the design team also refined the plan for the various clusters of content that will be released to the player throughout the game.

The programmers saw the finishing of some of the work from last week, connecting the texting app to the main view of the game, and using the database to provide the text in the conversations. A week’s worth of work and one long and grueling Friday night saw the seamless visual integration of these parts. There are still a couple known bugs with the display of the texts, and the bank app isn’t fully integrated yet, but significant progress has been made on both those fronts, and we feel like the prototype we have will be sufficient for halves.

In the art world, progress has been made on finalizing the layout of the notifications menu (which has tested well with playtesters), which included consulting with Shirley Yee, a typography expert, to make sure we are using good fonts. Shirley Yee confirmed that we are on a good track, and offered some ideas for minor improvements. The art team also made some images that will accompany news articles, as shown above.

Halves is days away, and Team Fortitude has accomplished a great amount of work in the development process. We’ve received plenty of feedback, the positive giving us the strength to keep pushing forward, and negative informing us how to fill the holes that must be filled to make Broke as strong as possible. We’re a team of determination and skill, and we’re ready to hear from the masses during our halves presentation on Wednesday. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week!