This week, we presented for Halves.

The team took Halves presentation very seriously. In addition to being part of our grade for the semester, Halves are also our first chance to show off our project to the world outside our client and team. We understood that we needed make our first impression a good one.

Beginning on Monday, we took the base information we had gathered and started trying to make a coherent presentation out of it. Working as a team, we were able to construct a proper narrative about our design process to this point. By Tuesday, we were ready to present to our faculty advisers, and get their feedback. Our biggest note was that we needed to show our work more. They meant both that we had to show the work we had accomplished more, as well as making it transparent as to how we had arrived at this stage in our design. It was a necessary but strange note to be told that we needed to brag about how unique and ground breaking our work is; after ten weeks of being inside of the project, it’s easy to forget that the things we’re doing every day really do make our work special.

To accommodate for the seventeen projects at the ETC this semester, presentations were split up over three days; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Home Front was scheduled to present on present on Friday. While we understood that more time for our presentation meant higher expectations, we also took advantage of being able to watch ten other teams present. By observing what worked and what was less successful in the other presentations, we were able to create goals to iterate towards.

Even with our focus being on Halves, the team didn’t sit idle with the design this week. In preparing for our presentation, it became clear that we would need to plainly articulate a sample round of play. This documentation had not been formalized; because we were iterating gameplay in fairly substantial ways between our last version and the current draft, most of our mechanical instructions for the game were still being given orally. Using Halves as our catalyst, the team produced a formal Use Case of our game, and created a recorded demo to be used as part of our presentation.

This week, Qiqi was also able to finalize a second version of the game art, which was approved by our client. With this version of the art, and the recorded play demo, we now had our most current design available to use for our presentation.

By Friday morning, we had incorporated our instructors notes, formalized our presentation, and practiced enough to feel comfortable speaking in front of our classmates and professors. It was time to present. Our slot was the last for the day, making us the 17th and final project to present this week.

For the record, it went quite well.

We’ll be getting formal feedback next week, and will continue onward with design. New priorities are to build a prototype of the game board, further test our current iteration of mechanics, and refine content as we move forward.

The Work This Week:

Week nine was spent preparing for Halves.

Halves presentations at the ETC are our first chance to publicly share our work. Presenting to students, faculty, and various clients, we are given fifteen minutes to explain our project, and our process. Afterwards, there is five minutes avail for questions. They serve to let us practice our formal presentation skills, and to allow faculty not intimately involved in our project an insight into our work.

With Matt and Miriam off at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the rest of the team started gathering materials for our presentation. As Qiqi finished the second draft of the art, Apoorva continued to work on our app, and Axel began structuring the presentation. While the work wasn’t terribly exciting, it was still vitally important to staying on track.

Regarding new work this week; the team has figured out a way to make text from the app on the phone visible to all players at the same time. Using a simple Pepper’s Ghost like setup, it is possible to make a rudimentary hologram above the phone screen, visible on all sides and clear enough to be read easy. The drive behind this concept is to keep players from interacting with the phone as much as possible. Every time a player touches the phone, we run the risk of pulling them out of the world we are trying to build. We expect to take this idea into a second prototype next week.

With Miriam and Matt back in the office on Friday, we finalized the rough draft of our Halves slide-deck and sent it off to our advisers for consideration. With our presentation scheduled for next Friday, we’ll have more time to prep as the week goes on, but we’ll want to make sure not to ignore our continued work on design as well.

The Work This Week:

Week eight was spent iterating and playtesting.

Capitalizing off of the momentum of last week’s breakthroughs, we aimed to get our initial version of the game in to as many hands as possible. This included several ETC groups, our project mentors, and one group of students from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. The play testing helped us confirm a few design ideas that had mostly been hunches, and also brought a few issues into clearer focus.

Also worth noting: We had our Quarters Sit-Downs, a chance for our advisers to speak with team members one-on-one, and check in regarding how we’re doing so far.

The first positive that we were able to confirm was that our target audience was exactly where it should be. By aiming for a target audience of players that have a solid sense of familiarity with each other, we were able to break through some of the initial barriers to conversation before the game even began. While it was observed in most of our playtests, it was confirmed in one playtest where the guests did not know each other well. Conversation quickly diverged from the game, and there was a good deal of posturing as people tried to not look week in front of strangers and classmates.

We also started to see direct effects of how emotionally grounding the text was. Every time the text was played, the game became both more personal on an emotional level, and less personal intellectual level. This always gave a solid boost to investment in the game, and conversation in general.

One fear we had confirmed was that our questions, and the current interaction of the game, was too intellectual. We were offering the players safe options to think their way out of situations we want to be visceral and emotional. This meant that we were back to the drawing board on the questions we wanted to ask our players.

We ended the week with a client call, running all the progress we had made past Ms. Goldsmith. She was a huge help in focusing our art direction, confirming mechanics, and helping us find the emotional core of the text. More than anything, she was a reminder that our client had already developed a process that worked.

Theater of War Productions has been working towards these sorts of emotional engagements for the last ten years. Going back to our original task of adapting their live performance, we need to understand that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Drawing from their lessons and successes will help us to avoid making mistakes they have already solved, and allow us more time to explore the new areas we hope to take their performance in to.

With next week being Spring Break, the team will be taking a small hiatus. Afterwards, we’ll be getting right back to iteration, and preparing for our Halves presentation.

The Work This Week:

Week seven was spent taking our ideas finding ways to put them into practice.

On Monday, we spoke with two experts in the field. Lance Weiler, a story teller, filmmaker, and professor at Columbia, was able to speak with the team about focusing our tone. Even though our goal of breaking down stigma around death was clear, our approach towards the subject was still very general. Mr. Weiler helped us understand the importance of how we needed to approach tone and feeling, as well as making sure our game as actually enjoyable to experience.

We were also able to speak with Tim Sweeney, an alumnus of the program and a developer at Schell Games. Mr. Sweeney was able to help us approach the mechanics of our experience. His advice was hugely beneficial for helping to ensure an engaging experience, and to make sure that the interactions our game used would lead to experiences we were aiming for.

We then met with Jessie Schell, a professor at the ETC and CEO of Schell Games. Mr. Schell was able to help us better understand the framework we wanted to use to present our game. Following his advice, we were able to better examine the benefits and and risks we were asking the player to expose themselves to. This conversation is also where we found the inspiration to frame our narrative around the idea of legacy, instead of just approaching death head on.

We used Wednesday as a time to re-frame our thoughts towards out interactions. The version of our game that emerged from our concentrated design was playtested the next two days

With two playtesting sessions on both Thursday and Friday, our initial player feedback was incredibly encouraging. Mechanics worked as they were intended, players’ reactions matched what we expected, and incorporating the text provided a very healthy grounding and distance which encouraged conversation.

Building from the success of our playtests, were are excited to be moving past brainstorming, and digging into iteration.