On Monday, the team had their ¼’s presentation. Overall, it went well and the professors were able to provide a wide variety of feedback and references. We were also able to narrow down our metrics of success to focus on Gameplay, Interactivity, and Storytelling. There was general excitement from the faculty about our demo topic of the Progressive Era Labor Movement, but some concern over how exactly we were going to make a tool for building narrative structures. As multiple professors pointed out, sandbox style play and branching narrative in the same project can create a lot of tension so we need to be careful about balancing the two.
Our instructor meeting this week inspired us to rethink how we were going about our rapid prototyping sprint. As a result, we narrowed our demo topic to the Homestead Strike of 1892. Xiao compiled the history in a Miro board as a reference point.
We also decided to test out an even wider variety of storytelling tools (regardless of if they are actually used in a classroom setting) and build out a prototype in Roblox. We ended up using the following to make our prototypes:
- Twine
- Miro
- PowerPoint
- Madlibs
- Spore Galactic Adventures
- Roblox
By Friday, we reviewed all of our prototypes and picked out some of the features in each that either overlapped across multiple prototypes or felt particularly beneficial. Using this process to guide us, we determined that our tool needed to have these three features:
- Narrative node structure for easy UX when creating branching narrative
- Status tracking of characters and objects
- An inventory of assets that players could drag, drop, move, and delete
We also narrowed down two “reach” features that would be nice to have, but are not our immediate goals. These included:
- Exclusive sharing so that only people in the same class could view each other’s work
- A save and load world feature
From here, the artists started working on an asset list, Rohit began looking into the asset inventory and placement system in Roblox, Chenguang started to compile and research our most needed features in a design doc, Xiao created on a more defined demo story, and Gillian started setting up meetings with relevant ETC staff.
Anlan also finalized our team logo after several iterations as her and Lyn began working our poster and half sheet.
