One step back…
We started off our week by expanding on our more or less idea, Who’s AI. Each team has started to enhance the game further. However, after meeting with our client again, it seems that our current game design are shifting away from the purpose of discovering harmful biases through game. As much as our mechanics of our Who’s AI idea has intention to do that, it is viewed more as a side task than the main focus. As such, we, as a team, have decided to take a step back and focus more on the game design element to fulfilling our client’s needs.
Despite this major change, let us not discount all the amazing effort everyone has put in so far. Here’s some updates we have made to our latest game idea, Who’s AI.
Updates
To aid us in our project development process, we have came up with a rough project timeline to keep us on schedule moving forward. The game designer has worked on a simple interactable prototype to help the team to be aligned to the same big picture of the game mechanics. The programmers have started to investigate Photon plugin in Unity to build a 2D multiplayer game. The artists have prepared a sample outlook of the game and 3 different character design to moving ahead.
Project Timeline Updates
We believe it is very important to have a schedule for us to follow so that we know how we are working as a team and decide to scope up or scope down accordingly. Here’s the rough timeline we are using moving ahead. Hope we can stay on track! #fingerscrossed
Game Design Updates
Despite having this rough prototype, we also recognize that we need to constantly work on improving them. As such, we have grouped them together for our reference.
Programmers Updates
With the aim of a multiplayer game in mind, our programmers have decided to work with Unity using the proton engine plugin. It is free to use for 20 concurrent users! Amazing, isn’t it?
Here’s a link to a short demo video built by our programmers.
Artists Updates
With a huge game coming up, our artists have put in a lot of work into figuring out how the game will look like.
Here’s a rough layout of what the artists imagined it will be together with some simple concept arts as references
Of course, with a strong artists team, we will create our own character and theming. Here are 3 strong character art styles made by our artists.
I must admit, it is really hard for us to decide on one as each of them has its own merits. Stay tuned to our decision in the next week 🙂
Client Meeting Update
Finally, moving on to the key event that happened this week for us to take one step back, our client meeting. We shared our updates earlier to our clients and they are very satisfied with them except for one thing, the core mechanism of the game.
Although our game, Who’s AI, aims to identify who is the AI making response to a question, it seems that this is only helping to detect mistakes made by the AI model instead of actual harmful biases which the actual player may feel from the AI outputs. As such, it seems that our core purpose of building this Game With A Purpose (GWAP) has shifted. As such, we have spent the rest of the time we have through the week to focus on brainstorming to shift the focus back to what our client want.
External Help from Dave
Despite advices from our faculty mentor, we have also decided to consult another of our faculty members, Dave. He is highly experienced in game design and has a strong focus in transformational thinking. With an hour of deep discussion with him, we seems to understand better what we really want to build this semester and how difficult the task is compared to what we imagined earlier.
As such, we decided to take a step back to focus on finding out the strategies a player can use to discover harmful biases and use that mechanism to try to come up with a game. As it will most likely to be a party game involving multiple players discussing and having fun, we have also decided to spend some time in the coming week to play some party games together as a team in the hope to figure out some fun mechanisms we can adapt.
Final Decision
As mentioned, we will be taking a step back to do a second round of brainstorming session with more research in the hope to create something better. Wish us luck 🙂
AIAuditors Production Update
Since we are back to brainstorming and our artists have some spare time, they focused on enhancing our project poster and half sheets as well. Stay tuned to see the end result!
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