As our eighth week of development began (and as Spring Break edged closer), we first decided to address the current individual nature of our game. In order to do this, we made the following changes to our design, keeping in mind our client’s suggestion that we have our players undergo a role switch over the course of our game:
- Players are now initially grouped into two large teams; there are no sub-teams contained inside each of those two larger teams.
- Players will then each create a piece of fake news that they believe will attract followers to their team (via the method that we’ve described in previous posts).
- Once this phase of the game is complete and followers have been tallied, we will reveal that players’ actions have yielded a potential consequence (in the context of our game, players will be spreading news about growing nuclear threats, which will result in missiles being readied to launch).
- Players will then have a limited amount of time to prevent this consequence from taking full effect (i.e. stopping missiles from launching). We will do this by having players pair up and create news that debunks their previous claims.
Upon making these changes, we sought feedback from both Dave Culyba and our faculty advisors. From each of these meetings, we learned that introducing some kind of consequence and then having players pair up afterwards would likely be hard; nonetheless, it was time for us to start building an actual prototype for halves.
Via the results of a narrative-related survey that we sent out to current college students, we settled on the main context within which we will be couching our players’ collective experiences (we will be conducting more surveys and/or playtests in the future concerning potential headlines players could interact with). What’s more, we have begun work on UI design, as well as our game’s back-end.
In the coming few weeks, we aim to do the following:
- Finish our halves presentation.
- Construct a playable prototype that we will be able to scale up for multiple players.
- Begin planning out future playtests.