Oh hello there! We are Team URSA and we are working on the Real World Live Game for the Games for Change Festival. We are a team made up of programmers, artists, producers, and a sound designer.
We started the week off by rearranging our workspace to create the best environment for our team. Our co-producers, Janet and Lisa, divvied up their responsibilities and the team proceeded with introductions. We came up with our team name, URSA, on that first day. Ursa refers to the constellation Ursa Major, or the big bear. Ursa Major contains within it the seven bright stars that make up the big dipper, including the North Star, which has guided people the world over for centuries. Since there are seven of us on our team and we are hoping to lead the way in social change with our project, the name seemed a perfect fit. We concluded our first day with team bonding over dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.
The week continued with a few initial brainstorming sessions to get the juices flowing about our topic. We discussed social issues that we could tackle with our game as well as ideas for games that could be played by a large group of people. We assigned team roles and responsibilities and reached out to our clients at Games for Change. We finalized our team’s core meeting hours and began working on a team logo.
We began Friday with a meeting with our faculty advisors, Ralph Vituccio and Brenda Harger. They provided an interesting perspective on our project and got us thinking about our project in new ways. We immediately began researching and brainstorming more topics to apply to our project. We also decided that URSA would be an acronym for Understanding Real Social Action. Our client got back in touch with us and we set our first meeting time with them on Monday of next week.
We are all so excited to be on this project and can’t wait to see what this semester holds for us!