For our project, Elaine Fath of the Center for Transformational Play asked our team to create a 10-15-minute party game that would help college students lead a more full and balanced life. Peter Kaufman, Chairman/CEO of Glenair Inc., funded this project.

When we were first given the task to help students in such a short amount of time, it felt a bit overwhelming. How could we create something that could actually create change? First, we had to see what had already been done, so we got to work, played as many party games as possible, broke down what parts we felt were engaging, and tried to find commonalities. From this research, we realized that the games we all liked the most were ones that got people to share about their lives. With this in mind, we decided to focus our efforts to create a game that helped students get to know each other and the perfect place to play a game like this would be on day one at orientation. We felt like orientation is the one moment before classes begin, and everyone is stressed, which allows students to come together and get to know one another. By creating a game where students can potentially find common interests, our hope was that this will help spark friendships and lay the foundation for stronger social support throughout their college experience, ultimately leading to a strong work-life balance. Our goal for the end of the semester was to have a fully playable game, and after a tremendous amount of work, we delivered.

We had a large team of 7 members who brought their skills to help make this game a success. These team members are Jiayu He, technical artist and co-producer; Shiwei Hong, programmer and level designer; Luka Liu, programmer; Haoze (Jacky) Sun, game designer, tech artist, and programmer; Regina Xia, game designer and artist; Shixi Zhang, UX designer and Jessica Cromp, game designer and producer. Our advisors on this project were Charles Johnson and Heather Kelley, and we had two consultants, Faris ElRayes, an ETC alum, and Geoff Kaufman, a professor at the HCI program at CMU.

We decided to make a multiplayer game for this project. Because it is the first time I tried to build a multiplayer game, it is hard to understand how the synchronization works and which data should be synchronized and among all the other issues such as lagging, etc. What we learned from this is we should plan well for the overall architecture of code way ahead before starting to implement it. For this project, we spent a lot of time during the brainstorming process. It was difficult to first listen to what kinds of games each teammate is passionate about building and then combine those into one game. Since we are a seven-person team, it was very hard to summarize the interesting perspectives and build them into one game. For example, some teammates wanted to build a laptop game that is about competing with different people, but some teammates wanted to do a party game that was collaborative and fun. The goal from our client of our game is fostering communication and playing it as a tool for people to engage and get to know each other. So, it was not easy to make a decision for a game to be collaborative or competitive in order to foster communication. Moreover, some teammates suggested we could keep the conversations among people just about in-game tasks. However, some teammates suggested the conversations should be more about learning each other in a personal way. Those debates are the ones we had during the brainstorming stage. We have overcome and solved those uncertainties and we came up with a united solution after talking about these questions with our clients and instructors. Our client helped us reframe the goal and imagined a use case for this game. We had a clearer vision of what we are making. Finally, we all agreed on making an ice-breaker party game for strangers on college orientations. 

Our team overcame a lot of challenges this semester, and one of the biggest successes was finding a cohesive vision for our game. One thing that really helped our team was being part of the design collective that Elaine started that met every Wednesday over the semester. During this time we met with two other teams who were also working on games focused on addressing work life balance and each team would share their research and get feedback on their prototypes. This collective helped to push our team each week to bring in a new prototype so that we could receive valuable feedback to help us improve our game. We started off small with paper prototypes that helped us to see what was working and what parts were producing the most discussions and that allowed us to pivot quickly. Since we spent a lot of time at the beginning of the semester brainstorming, these weekly playtests helped to accelerate our development and helped lead us to success. Also having Geoff as our subject matter expert for our discussion phase questions really helped us to think deeply about how we should phrase our questions to help produce longer and more engaging discussions to help spark friendships. During the ETC Playtest Day, it was incredibly rewarding to see people having fun and learning about each other while playing our game and we really felt like all the work we put into our research really paid off.

Our client suggested we should plan to continue working on it in the future CTP Pipeline to Public program since she is very happy with our final product and she approved its effectiveness on achieving the goal. The Pipeline to Public program allows students an additional semester to polish and receive mentorship on achieving their goals for the game to submit to festivals and possibly do a research paper. In addition to our clients, during our playtest day, there were playtesters from educational programs and in business who said they would like to use our game for their students and at their office. We were really happy with this positive feedback and look forward to hopefully participating in the Pipeline program to help us to see its full potential.