Hello!
This week we focused on iterating on our game and preparation for 1/2s. Our 1/2s presentation will be Wednesday at 9:00 AM. (Link to follow)
1/2s
Based on the feedback from our advisors (and the outlines set out for what to present on for 1/2s), we wanted our presentation to be organized as follows: early semester and 1/4s feedback -> iterating and current state -> moving forward and deployment.
The next post will talk more about the actual content of the presentation, but here I just wanted to mention how we intend to show the checkpoints for some of the important aspects of the project: narrative, art (environment and character), and the programming/build itself.
Progress
As previously mentioned, we planned to iterate a lot on where we had been for process grades. Below are some of the visual iterations (not necessarily finalized). We are still developing these aspects but these are likely the versions that we will actually discuss during 1/2s.
Playtesting
Next week on Tuesday, we will be working with Anthony Palyszeski in order to playtest our game. There are ~20 high school students from Laurel Highlands School District (a rural school 90 minutes away from Pittsburgh) that would like to stop by some project rooms so that they can have a better understanding of what happens at the Entertainment Technology Center. These students are not our exact audience but can likely give additional perspective to what 8th graders are receptive to.
(EDIT 10/10: Unfortunately, Anthony has had to cancel this playtesting due to a personal emergency.)
Meeting with Anna Fisher
On Friday, we met with Anna Fisher, an Associate Professor of Psychology here at CMU, member of the NextGen Project team, and affiliated researcher with Collaboratory Against Hate.
Our meeting with Anna was based on getting Anna up to speed with our current status and then seeing how we can get 1.) immediate feedback and 2.) future direction. Anna advised us about how to handle certain aspects of communicating the material and believes that our current approach likely adequately disguises the lessons we are trying to introduce. We need to make sure we are not disguising our message too heavily, but working with Anna in the future will likely help us ensure that is not the case. I have included some relevant links below for some of the work Anna has done:
https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/cogdevlab/nextgen-project
Moving Forward
Again, we have our presentation on Wednesday, with practice times scheduled on Saturday and Monday. We will make the presentation available in the next blogpost and likely include it in our media section. We are continuing with development, but our current priority is refining our project for display at 1/2s.
Thanks for reading,
James from STEMspire