Hi! We are a team of graduate students from the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University. This semester we are working with Maxis Studios at Electronic Arts to create a VR experience that derives inspiration from our client’s products. We were excited on our first day to be at Electronic Arts and to meet our team. We set up our project room and then had a meeting with our faculty advisors. They gave us an overview of what to expect from our client and how to prepare for the meeting with the client the next day. After that we had a team meeting and got to know each other’s skills and interests.
On the second day, we held a team gathering to brainstorm what questions to ask our client in order to get a clear idea on what they expect from us. We then met with our client. This was insightful as we got detailed information on their expectations and at an opportunity to see a demo of their current project. We had a brainstorming session later that day and settled on the themes and design pillars that inspired us as a team.
The next day everyone pitched in their concepts based on those design pillars and discussed them in detail a. We then voted on these and chose the most exciting potential concepts for our project.We decided that each of us would use the concepts from the list to flesh out three ideas for a game for the next day. We also brainstormed on team names and came up with a few, including “Olympus” and “Simagine”.
The following day, all of us had ideas for a prospective game. This turned out to be a good method as we didn’t have to spend lot of time thinking about ideas for the game during our brainstorming sessions. Later, we researched similar games that already exist in the market and also the games which inspired our client’s current product.
For the coming week, we will meet with our client and walk them through our design concepts, ideas and thought process. We will also be deciding our team name next week. It was a productive first week and we are excited to see what happens next.