Timothy just finished our poster last night. It’s simple and stylish, with carries a strong message.
Week 3 is the objective defining week for us. We dug deep to the core of the problem space, and try to design the game based on the problems we are solving.
Since our game is overlapping with transformational game, we attended an online workshop about Transformational Framework. The framework is a series of exploratory questions that drive the early exploration of the development process. After some discussion about the framework, we realized that we can’t give proper answer to several questions within the framework. So we set out to looks for answers from our client and our audience.
We did telephone interview with 3 participants of the Business Continuity Plan Exercises. They are from Parking and Transportation Services, Health Services Clinical Operations, and Computing Service Helps Center respectively. Although they are from very different departments, the Business Continuity Plans remain similar. All of them are very satisfied with the current tabletop simulation exercise ran by our client Melanie each year. They think the exercise helped them a lot to test their BC plan, and figure out problems with their existing plan. And the other important function of the exercise is to get the stuffs familiar with the BC plan, so that they are prepared when a real disaster happens.
From our audience’s feedback, we realized that the current version of exercise is working pretty well, and there is no problem that we need to fix for the audience. So maybe it’s our client Melanie, the game master of the exercise, has problems that she needs to fix?
During the weekly meeting with Melanie, we elaborated the objectives and priorities that we concluded. Melanie agreed with what we came up with, and contributed her own thought and needs about the game that we are going to make. She is not trying to solve any existing problems. She wants a game that could enhance the current exercise experience, to make it more fun and engaging. And the game could assist her with her current work, make her work easier and more efficient.
Summarizing the feedback from both our client and audience, we came up with a requirement list. Once we list down the requirements, things become much clearer. We are no longer searching in the dark for the right design, we are targeting problems and trying to solve them. We did another brainstorm session around all the requirements, each idea trying to solve a problem. We came up a list of required game features, and several different gameplay ideas, each with a different emphasize on different problems. For example, we have multi-player game ideas trying to make everyone more engaged. And we have single-player game ideas trying to encourage discussion among the participants.
We will be doing our idea pitches to Melanie on next Monday. Once she picks the idea that she thinks fit her priority, we will start working on the prototype before 1/4 walk around, so that we have some product to show to the faculties.