We started this week with our Quarters presentation to the faculty at the ETC. During Quarters, the faculty visits each project room and each team presents the work they have done up to that point. We presented the ideas that we had prepared to pitch to our client. The faculty gave us so much great feedback. Immediately following Quarters, our team met to interpret the feedback we received and see what feedback we could implement into our project. It became clear to us that a few of our ideas just were not feasible or had too many restrictions. But due to that feedback, we were able to focus in on what was feasible for our project, which pushed us forward in a new direction.
Early in the week, we heard back from our client. She liked the social issues that we presented to her and gave us the green light to move forward with these issues. Yan, our game designer, began coming up with new game ideas that were inspired by the approved social issue.
Thanks to the feedback from the faculty during Quarters, we decided that it would be more beneficial to use HTML5 and cell phones to implement our game. This opened up our project schedule a bit more as we would not have to submit an app to the Apple App store. Our programmers began researching ways to use HTML5 and tested the capabilities of HTML5 on a phone so that once we had a good idea that was based in the approved social issue, we could begin prototyping as soon as possible.
Our producers spent much of the week figuring the logistics of when and where exactly our game will be taking place during the Games for Change festival. They also organized a meeting for us to reflect on how our team had been functioning over the last 5 weeks and to bring up ideas for how we could potentially do things differently. This helped our team to refocus and keep moving forward.
Friday was a day full of meetings. We first met with our advisors who were joined by Dave Culyba. Dave provided us with very helpful advice on creating a game for a festival and specifically for the Games for Change festival. Immediately following that, we had a conference call with our client. From that call, we decided that the social issue we would design our game around would be World Hunger and the sub-issues contained within that. We felt that as an issue, there was much more that we could pull from to create a truly meaningful game. Later that day, we also met with Melanie Lam who helped us shape the way we are thinking about the project. She also helped us to really define the space in which we are working to design this game.
Next week we plan to continue to investigate world hunger so that we can hit the ground running with prototyping and production, and we cannot wait!
As a team, we focused all of our efforts this week on refining our ideas for the project, refining our team’s branding, and preparing for our Quarter Presentations.
We started this week by meeting with faculty members both in the ETC and on main campus to gain some more insight into the development of a game about social issues. We split our efforts so that half of the team met with Jessica Hammer, a new faculty member here at the ETC, and the other half met with Paolo Pedercini, a faculty member on main campus CMU. Both of these meetings provided us with interesting insight into the development of games that deal with a social issue. A few of us also went to the playtesting workshop put on by Jessica Hammer and Mike Christel. This was very helpful in getting us thinking about the types of playtests we would need to set up this semester. Later in the week, we met with Jesse Schell and discussed our project and current ideas with him. He also gave us some very helpful advice. All of these meetings inspired our team conversations and pushed us to work even harder.
Janet, Lisa, Tim, and Yan continued researching social issues. We narrowed our research down to world hunger and economic inequality. We spent hours going to various charity websites and reaching out to them. The few charities that we did get into contact with, we asked what the core of the issue was and what challenges they, as a charity, were facing in trying to solve this issue. This led to some very interesting insights and new perspectives that we were not aware of. After our individual research, the four of us met and discussed what we had gleaned from our research and from calling charities. From this discussion, we pulled out 3 one-sentence statements about the state of the issues we researched and brought them to the rest of the team.
Our programmers, Ken and Alex set up our Unity account. Since our game will eventually be played by a large number of people, they prototyped a very basic network that could interact between devices. Jack, along with the other artists, received critiques on the first draft of our team branding. Following that, Jack continued to edit and refine our team’s logo, half sheet, and poster. We also took our team picture. Tim edited the photo, and it ended up being very silly.
We all came back together and produced a few new ideas, but also built upon the ideas we came up with last week. At the end of the week, we presented these ideas to our advisors and our client. The feedback was mixed, but we as a team felt that we found a direction that really inspired us. We began preparations for our Quarter Presentation on Monday. Next week we look forward to receiving feedback from the faculty during Quarters. We also cannot wait to begin implementing our ideas!
This week we have been focused on setting up the framework for our project and how we are organizing our team work structure.
We started this week by attending a workshop as a team that helped us learn how to narrow down our brainstorming ideas and shift our focus onto one or two ideas. This led to interesting discussions about the goals of our project as well as the goals of Games for Change as a movement. As a team, we solidified our problem statement, identified the audience that we are trying to reach, and set our goals for this project. With all this in mind, we went back and developed our ideas more and selected 3 to pitch to our client.
After pitching our ideas to Emily, she gave us some really great feedback and suggestions to help our project develop even more. She said we were on the right track, but we just needed to refine our ideas a bit more. So as a team, we broke off and continued to work hard at refining our ideas. We discussed previous Games for Change games and analyzed their design. We discussed potentially partnering with a charity so that our game can have real world effects.
Our producers have been hard at work this week setting up the timeline for our project and setting goals for the team. They taught the team Scrum and how we will be using it in our project. They set up a scrum board for us and began planning the sprint goals for our project. In addition, our artist Jack has been busy working on creating our team logo as well as other pieces of branding for our project throughout the semester.
We ended the week with another meeting with our advisors Ralph and Brenda. They gave us some helpful advice. This weekend we are going to push to really refine our ideas so that next week we can bring them to the client and begin prototyping and development.
Hello again! This week has been a week of storms–both literal and figurative. The polar vortex produced some blustery winter days and a few snow showers this week. With temperatures dipping below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, we kept warm by brainstorming on hot social topics.
We started our week off with our first client meeting with Emily from Games for Change. We had numerous questions for her about the festival and she provided us with great insights. After our meeting with Emily, we decided to focus more on the social impact that we are trying to create with our game. Each of us chose a social issue that we thought was important, such as homelessness and unemployment, social and economic segregation, or sustainability, and did some preliminary research. The research we conducted ignited many interesting conversations amongst the team about the tough social issues in our modern world. We each presented the research of our social issues and we discussed them as a team, trying to get to the core of the issues. Having discussed these issues, we focused our brainstorming on what message we were trying to get across to the players, and then, with that in mind, what kind of game experience would best suit that message.
On Wednesday we had another team bonding event. We threw a mini surprise party for Lisa’s birthday and celebrated with cake! Then we watched a documentary recommended by Ralph and Brenda called The Gleaners and I. Though this documentary was not directly related to the social issues that we had been researching, it did inspire some new thoughts and ways of thinking about our own social issues.
Our producers have been very busy this week. They created a spreadsheet with everyone’s roles and responsibilities clearly laid out and created an accountability system to ensure that we all stay on track. After our client meeting, they began looking at the whole semester and laying out our schedule of production. Our client recommended that we come and visit New York City to get a tour of the space where the festival will be held. So our producers have also been working hard to plan a team trip with our advisors in the next two weeks.
We ended our week with an early morning meeting with Ralph and Brenda and solidified a few ideas for our project. Next week we will pitch these ideas to Emily at Games for Change and narrow down our focus even more. We plan to conduct deeper research into our short list of social issues as well as begin to design some of the gameplay elements.
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!