Author: teamfortitude

Hello! For anyone who wants to download BROKE: The Game, here are some links to its page on the App Store and Google Play:

tinyurl.com/broke-ios
tinyurl.com/broke-android

Be aware, there is a known bug on Samsung devices that prevents players from choosing a character. We are currently in the process of trying to fix that.

Thank you for downloading! Stay tuned for more character profiles coming out soon!

In this final, epilogue of a week, Team Fortitude gave their final presentation for BROKE, handed off all the project’s materials to the client, and led BROKE into the vast unknown we mortals call the Google Play Store. Let’s take a look at how the team got there.

The first part of the week was primarily spent in preparing for our final presentation on Wednesday, the slides for which can be viewed here. The presentation covered the reception of the finished product, descriptions of how our metrics of accessibility, empathy, and education were showcased in the design, writing, art, tech, the client tools, and the add-ons, and the lessons we learned from our project. Though we haven’t heard back from the faculty about official feedback from our presentation, we’ve heard good things overall from the grape vine.

We finished the project this week, which mostly involved smaller tweaks and bug fixes. Specifically, the art team finished the box art and UI/icon adjustments, the tech team finished up the client tool and technical documentation, and the design team finished the documentary and project archives. Once all of that was done, we handed everything off to our client, who will now be in charge of distributing the game and adding all add-ons to brokethegame.com. While she was here, we worked for several hours to upload BROKE to the Google Play Store. It was a long and frustrating process that ended in plenty of screaming and victory dances as BROKE became available for the world to download and experience. However, BROKE was removed from the Google Play store days later due to Violation of Usage of Android Advertising ID policy and section 4.8 of the Developer Distribution Agreement. We found this ridiculous, but we have a good lead on how to fix it and get reinstated, since this seems to be a known issue with Unity games.

Other than helping our client distribute BROKE on the App Store and Google Play Store (and keep it there!), that’s it. The six members of Team Fortitude reunited for the last time in a movie theater to watch Detective Pikachu together, and then we parted ways. We’re all very happy with how the project turned out, and feel like we did some good in the world by helping this game with such an important message become a reality. We’d like to thank you, the readers, and everyone who has supported us and helped BROKE become a reality and make it the best game it can be. Keep an eye on the App Store and Google Play stores for when the game is released, and give it a go. And remember to show compassion for the less financially well-off. Your empathy makes a difference. So, without further ado, this is Team Fortitude, the developers of BROKE: The Game, signing off.

This week saw many parts of the project wrap up into a completed state, just in time for the ETC Open House we saw on Friday, during which old and new faces came to play BROKE and share their thoughts and what they learned. Let’s take a look at how we got there.

The tech team finished the client tool, allowing Dana Gold to easily input the content for the final three characters (single parent, elder, and illegal immigrant) without having to learn a single iota of programming knowledge. She came in this week to try out the tool, and found it very intuitive and easy to work with, which was a great relief for Team Fortitude.

The tech team is also working on our narrative data processing compiler, which helps transform the text-based content into a fully-functioning interactive narrative, the settings app, representing the bank amounts as a piggy bank instead of a numerical value, and the technical documentation. They also managed to fix all remaining UI bugs, which means that now all the features the team wanted are in the game and fully functional!

The art team helped the tech team with all the UI bugs, the box cover, profile icons for the three remaining characters, and changed the previous flood image to include a concerned cow standing on the roof of the car.

The design team worked mostly on documentation of the project, slides for Wednesday’s final presentation, and archive materials. At this point, adding more design would be detrimental to the project, since it has to be done on Friday morning, so that’s most of what the design team will be doing for the rest of the semester.

The documentary team was able to make a rough cut of the documentary. Unfortunately, that rough cut is 29 minutes long, when it’s only supposed to be 15 minutes long, so more cutting and refinement will be necessary in the upcoming week.

The week ended with the annual ETC Open House, which allowed many guests and other students to come to our project room and try out BROKE. Overall, the response was very positive, and while some bugs were discovered, they were fixed by the time the Open House was over. We also put up a poster saying “Something I Learned About Poverty Is…” and encouraged guests to put a sticky note on the poster to answer the question. Here’s what they said:

“I didn’t know homeless shelters have requirements for money goals and timeliness”

“It’s really hard to get out of.”

“No sympathy.” (referring to how nobody has sympathy for those in poverty)

“A lot more people are in danger of being homeless or running out of food than I expected.”

“It helps me live through the situation :)”

“You have to choose between bad choices without knowing what longer term repercussions might be.”

“Your dignity’s worth nothing when you are in poverty.”

“People are not lazy, it’s circumstances which are difficult.” (another guest wrote “ditto” on this one)

“To balance money and your belief (e.g. justice, kindness…) is hard. There are man though choices, but it’s still important to stick to some belief. Even if you really need money.”

“It needs to be discussed.”

“It’s challenging to make minute to minute decisions.”

Overall, it is very encouraging for us to see that overall, people who play BROKE are gaining more empathy for people living with the condition of poverty. That is our overarching transformational goal, after all, so it looks like our game truly is a success! And speaking of transformational games, Sabrina Culyba, author of the Transformational Framework, which we referred to very often in the first month of the project, came to the ETC Open House to play BROKE. She had some small notes of improvement for us, but said that we were doing a good job overall, which was a very good sign for us.

BROKE is seriously wrapping up in this final week of development. Aside from a few minor bug fixes, refinement of the documentary, and our final presentation on Wednesday, BROKE is completely done. Considering the repeating, positive response we’ve had from playtesters and our client alike, it seems like we can definitely call this project a success. See you next week for the very last blog post by Team Fortitude.

This week was the soft opening of Team Fortitude’s game BROKE. We are in the home stretch of the development of this game, and it is vital that BROKE is as close to finished as possible. We had a lot of faculty look at our game this week, and their expectations were exceedingly high. Let’s see how Team Fortitude fared in this penultimate week.

The last time a large group of faculty saw BROKE was at halves, and back then, many faculty members were confused by what the final product of the game was, and thought the text app would be the entire game, which is far from the truth, now that we have email, banking, news, and CircleUp in the game, which led to a lot of faculty being pleasantly surprised by our near-final product’s levels of depth and complexity. The main feedback was in reference to UI usability, but the vast majority of what was said referenced fixes we already planned on making. There were also some minor tweaks with the writing that were suggested, which were fixed immediately. Considering how minor the suggestions of the faculty largely were, we feel like we’re in a very good place now moving into the final product.

The tech team mostly worked on various minor fixes this week, but also implemented some small features. Those include audio integration, the client tool to add new content to the game, and notifications from CircleUp. The tech team also split up a bit, due to the low amount of work now compared to during the rest of the project, so members of the tech team also worked on documentation, IRB (Institutional Research Board) certification, and the parsing the final interview in order to finish the documentary.

The design team did some fixes in the balancing of the game, namely because it was impossible to win as the homeless character, which is only slightly more bleak than in real life, so that was fixed. They also did quality assurance to find any bugs in the narrative tree that might have been missed. They also worked on changing the way monetary success in the bank app is displayed from a numerical representation (which would be extremely difficult to display with accuracy, given the many factors that go into expenditures that we don’t have time to deal with) into a visual representation. Also, the post-game discussion questions from the original board game were altered to fit the single-player nature of the digital version. Finally, the design team rebranded itself as the design/sound team, and produced the sound effects for the various notifications in the game.

The art team worked on the visual representation in the bank app, as per request of the design team. They also worked on the redesign of the board game art, the endgame summary, and the interface of the settings app.

We’re just about to start the final week of the development of BROKE. It’s now or never for us to deliver a final, quality, shippable game, but given that we don’t have any major redesigns or fixes to make in the game, we’re confident that we’re well on our way to sending something that can truly increase empathy for those living in the condition of poverty out into the world. We wish the team the best of luck. See you next week for the last ever Team Fortitude blog post!

This week saw a transition in Team Fortitude from spending the majority of our time working on new content to polishing content that already exists. Our team has played the game fully and put it in the hands of others, and now most of the work that remains is improving upon that content and making it fit for the masses. Let’s get into that process.

The first prototype of the full version of the game was clearly buggy, but the tech team has been compiling a list of known bugs and kinks to iron out, and has been tackling them all. The database has been modified structurally, and the code for it has been modified. A lot of UI issues have been fixed. In addition to these fixes, work has gone into creating the starting scene of the game, where players can choose the character they will play as.

Speaking of the starting screen, the art team has been working on that as well. The art team has also worked on each of the intro pages that introduce the possible player characters. The art team has also worked on altering some aspects of the UI to make it more intuitive.

The design team has spent this week transferring all conversations in the game and their associated data into the database, making every character accessible. They also made balancing adjustments to the game by adjusting the consequences of all the decisions the player could potentially make in the game. They also created more content specifically for the beginning and end of the game.

This week also saw the rise of the new documentary team, who spent most of this week working on creating the project video, shown below. In order to do that, the documentary team split apart all the interviews that have been conducted (except the new interview with Rowan that was conducted on Thursday) into small segments of quotes that can easily be located, taken, and placed into the documentary.

Our soft opening is coming VERY soon, on Tuesday, April 23rd, and while we’ve heard that the faculty have very high expectations for all of the project teams, we feel like we’re in a good place, as we’ve consistently done well with playtesters and have incorporated nearly every feature we’ve planned on delivering. All we can do now is polish off whatever we can and hope for the best. See you next week!

This week was an arduous one for the tech team, and saw a big transition in the team’s mindset from progressing forward to realizing that the end product will have to be fully produced soon. With that in mind, everyone worked extra hard to get as close as possible to a playable prototype, and, sure enough, we got there! Let’s get into the process that made it happen.

The tech team really pulled all the separate pieces of the app into one fully playable prototype this week. They pulled the latest night in the history of the project, all of them working well past four in the morning on Sunday night and one spending the night on the couch in the project room, but they had a tremendous amount of work to show for it; The News, Bank, Team, and Email apps were all finished. The clusters have been fully implemented and their modules assigned. The text app’s ability to load states was finished. The database side of Circle Up, Email, News, Bank, Situations, Clusters, Profiles, and Text were all finished.

The art team has also been hard at work on various user interfaces, notably email, as well as finalizing the logo for the game and the intro pages for each character. They also worked on shaders for the graph in the bank app that shows the player’s monetary trends.

The design team has been finalizing the dialogue in all the different situations in the game, and getting the client’s approval. The design team has also been editing the project video, mostly by cutting down the interview footage that has been collected so far into nuggets of quotes that might appear in the documentary and cataloging all of those.

The game is finally starting to feel complete now. We still have to implement most of the dialogue that has been written and fix some UI bugs, but the product is starting to feel very real and complete, which has been very exciting. Now here’s hoping we can carry this productivity and success into our soft opening next Tuesday!

This week, the number of people who have seen BROKE has increased by the hundreds, and the response to the game as it stands has been better than we expected. Let’s see who these people are, and what we did this week to make it so likable.

This week, we had two big opportunities to get BROKE out into the world: A conference our client went to and playtest day. Early in the week, our client, Dana Gold, went to a conference about transformational games, which was attended by about 300 people. Attendees were instructed to work together to come up with game ideas that focused on poverty (how convenient), so Dana showed her group Broke, and they really liked the idea. One of the people in the group, who was representing CVS Pharmacy, said they would be interested in buying BROKE to help with employee retention, since that’s a problem the company faces. At the end of the conference, Dana got to present BROKE to all the attendees there, and, again, had a very positive reception. The only complaint was that sometimes it took too long for messages to appear on the screen (even though all the characters type at 90-120 words per minute, but a great game designer knows that great games often don’t reflect reality in ways that players don’t notice), which leads us to what the design team did this week.

Firstly, the design team worked on increasing the speed at which the characters in BROKE type. They now type at 210-300 words per minute, staying consistent with the reality that every person in poverty in the world is also a stenographer. The design team also finished all of the homeless character’s conversations and started on those of the rural character. They also renamed the Team app, since our client thought it should be named something that relates more to the real world, so the new name we chose is Circle Up, referencing the circles in Google+. Circle Up is also currently being tinkered with and balanced. Also, through marketing on Facebook and Reddit, we have six more people interested in being intervewed for BROKE’s documentary.

The programming team continued their work on the text app, so the contact list is now implemented. The news app is also done, and history for the bank and news is progressing. The database can now retrieve and store data fully. The Circle Up app has also been started.

The art team has finished the interface for Circle Up and BROKE’s logo. We also have a new image for the flood, which is a news item that will come up.

The last event of the week was playtest day on Saturday, an ETC tradition that brings masses of people in to test the teams’ games. Playtest day brought 10 strangers into our project room, and we got to hear from them what they thought of the game. Overall, the response was much more positive than we expected. They really felt immersed and connected to the characters, and we were praised for making a game that brings attention to the issues that people in poverty face. There were some minor suggestions, but nothing remarkably difficult or out of scope.

Overall, this week has been a big morale booster as we’re getting closer to the end of the semester. It’s too late to make many huge design decisions, so it’s a relief to know that the big-picture design choices are being received well by the outside world. We’ve still got a lot to go, but we hope we fully intend to keep the high quality work coming.

This week, Team Fortitude continued its development of BROKE, and saw a change in the development process as the team began to focus less on the continuum of development and more on finalizing the end product of the app. This was mainly due to the fact that we had to produce an alpha version of the game for our client to take to a conference.

The alpha version combined all the work we’ve done so far; it included a notification on the home screen that encouraged players to go to the text app, where they’d play through a conversation, the outcome of which would notify them that their bank balance changed. The player could then see a graph showing how their bank balance changed within the bank app.

In order to produce this, the tech team had some work to do; they finished the bank app (complete with graph that automatically scales on the y-axis!), worked on changing the text app so that conversations with multiple contacts can be accessed, and adjusted the database to improve the recording and retrieval of information. These new developments have come together to create our smoothly working alpha version. We plan to have a beta version done by the end of Week 13, just in time for our soft opening. The beta will be fully playable from start to end for one character.

The design team has also been hard at work finalizing the clusters for the purple character so as to tell their story. More conversations have also been written for them. The design team has also conducted three interviews with Ange, Kayleah, and Alexander, three people who experience poverty on a daily basis. The design team learned a lot about poverty, and are now more informed about what poverty is really like. The three interviewees also all agreed to be part of the in-game documentary, so the design team got a couple hours of potential footage for that. More interviews are to come in future weeks.

The art team has been finalizing the logo for the game, working alongside our client to get the best possible result. More work has also been done on the design of the cover of the box of the board game.

The game is coming together, and now that the soft opening of our project is in sight, Team Fortitude is continuing to develop BROKE’s final features and tie all the content we’ve created into one transformational package.

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.