Week 8: March 18, 2022 – Spring Break + Iteration After 1/2s

Hello!

This post will cover everything from spring break through the end of week 8 (March 18th).

Spring Break
During spring break, we did not put in dedicated development time. However, we were able to do a bit of research by going shopping in person. Em and James went to the Monroeville Mall to check out H&M, Forever 21, and the nearby Plato’s Closet. Jingyuan went to Buffalo Exchange in Southside.

H&M and Forever 21
Both of these stores seemed to address eco-friendly clothing very similarly. Most garments made no mention of how eco-friendly (or unfriendly) they were. Specific options that were eco-friendly would usually have a display standee or tag, consistently a green tag usually featuring a leaf. Based on their practices, we saw how the stores don’t want shoppers to think about how few garments were tagged eco-friendly (probably less than 5% of items available in the store based on our experience). Instead, these stores hope that by tagging items with green tags (and distributing these items throughout the store), they would appear to have numerous eco-friendly options.

Plato’s Closet
This secondhand store basically made no mention of eco-friendly clothing. Our understanding of the reasoning behind this was that A.) by being a thrift store, they were already being more considerate of extending the lifespan of individual garments and B.) identifying the origins of individual materials in garments becomes difficult to impossible for these types of stores. While stores like H&M and Forever 21 can know the enter lifecycle of the clothes in their stores, thrift stores can’t necessarily have that same knowledge.

 

Week 8
During week 8, we started honing in on a few different aspects that I’ll go into below.

Roles
We felt that having dedicated roles would allow our team to focus more easily and not make every decision into a 6 person (or 9 person including clients and advisors) decision. These roles are meant to be a plan for how we will distribute work moving forward but are not set in stone and can shift as team priorities shift. We decided to split up our roles/responsibilities in the following way:

UX Design/Transformational Framework: someone who manages our framework and transformations and focuses specifically on why these transformations are important and how they can happen (more of a teaching focus rather than game design) + make documentation for the transformations (Sarah & Jingyuan)

UX Design/Game: someone who develops prototypes to incorporate the transformations into our game experience (Danny, Xiunan, Sarah, Jingyuan)

Game/Mechanics Design: someone who works on polishing the mechanics and functions of the game experience once the transformations are implemented into the experience
(James)

Programmer: works on creating the build based on prototypes and testing what platforms work best for the experience (James & Xiunan)

3D Artist: manages creation of 3D assets needed for the final build but also creates assets for early prototypes (stand ins rather than real assets if they are needed) (Danny)

UI Artist/2D: creates 2D UI needed for the prototypes as well as the final build and any other 2D assets than may be needed (Em)

Website: someone who maintains and updates the website (James & Jingyuan)

Producer: someone who manages scope and overall production of the project as well as handling scheduling and communication (Sarah & Em)

Writing/Narrative: (James & Em)

 
One Page Designs
We felt that starting to create One Page Designs would be a helpful way to visualize/summarize details from our project. Presented below are two One Page Designs. The one on the left is a gameplay flow chart for one of the previous prototypes we had completed and the one on the right is a diagram of a potential setup for the Games For Change Festival.