Week 10: November 11th, 2022 – Preparation for Late Semester

Hello!

This week we started discussing what the rest of the semester needs to look like in order for us to reach our goals.

Finale vs Character Exploration

Most of game falls into one of two categories: attempting the Finale or exploring the environment/talking to other characters. For a long time, those two parts have been in conflict, competing to try to attract the player’s attention. We recognize that in order for our game to be successful based on actual helping our audience approach racial bias, we can’t have the gameplay purposely remove the user from this goal.

We want the Finale to feel like a culmination of efforts, both the player’s and the NPCs. The player should feel proud to overcome the challenge because they were able to connect with our NPCs. Moving forward, we want to ensure that the relationship to the NPCs and the context of you completing the Finale are very much connected to the rest of the game.

Some of our plans for approaching this are to:

  • Make sure the Finale includes NPC input
  • Simplify the Finale to ensure gameplay complexity is appropriate
  • Not try to pull player attention away from communicating with characters and exploring the environment

Most of these plans we believe can be accomplished by ensured Finale design decisions are not made in a vacuum and instead are made with the entire context of the experience in mind.

Expanded Dialogues

We recognize that a large chunk of our intended experience revolves around talking with NPCs. Up to this point in the semester, we have had approximations as to what those individual chats looked like, but moving forward we want to ensure those dialogues are fully implemented so that we can receive feedback on them. Our hope is to consistently update the dialogue as we get feedback and by ensuring we have our current states messages in game will be paramount to allowing us to receive feedback. We recognize that our advisors, consultants, client, and experts will be able to give us additional perspective IF and only if we have content to put in front of them.

As we begin to approach the end of the semester, we believe ensuring our educational content is landing and communicates a solid message is crucial to our project.

Consistent Builds

With the previous point in mind, we want to ensure we are frequently putting out new builds with current state information. Previously we might have made multiple builds within a week, but we were not consistent. Now our goal is to regularly put out builds and try to make our changes very accessible so that we can gain feedback as easily as possible.

As of this point in the semester, we will post our updated builds to the following link: https://hjwang.itch.io/power-core-values
That link requires a password to play, which is stemspire. If at some point later in the semester we are using a different URL, I will add an addendum to this post.

ADDENDUM: Future builds will be posted to http://powercorevalues.etc.cmu.edu/

The individual builds will start featuring a version number on the main menu screen, which should be an easy way to keep track of how recently it has been updated.

Future Advising

One of our advisors, Mike, has a meeting with members of our advisory panel on Wednesday of next week. We want to ensure that we have a build with reasonable educational content for them to go over. These people are not game creators. If we want to get great feedback based on their expertise, we need to have suitable content for them to analyze. Our goals for the first part of the week are ensuring that we have a build that we look forward to getting in front of them.

Moving Forward

Our individual responsibilities will likely change moving forward. We ideally have many of the assets we will want and additional attention can be focused on refining dialog, improving the user experience, and preparing for our mock workshop on December 2nd (more on that in a later post). We have a lot on our plate but at this current time have no reason to believe we will be unable to reach our goals.

Thanks for reading,

James from STEMspire