Hello!
1/4s
Hard to believe it is already time for 1/4s but here we our. Our 1/4s presentation is on Wednesday so we are using to time on Monday and non-Core hours on Tuesday to continue preparing for the presentation.
We are in the process of scheduling a meeting with our intended audience (8th grade students) through a number of resources provided to us by our client. Our hope is to be able to meet before 1/4s to better understand our audience. That said, we are going to be developing for initial prototypes/narrative prototypes prior to meeting with the audience so that we have something to get their feedback on. With their feedback, we can make changes to show during our 1/4s presentation.
Our current plan for 1/4s is to use most of the time to ask as targeted questions as possible of the faculty. We feel that using the individual faculty specialties to get insight on our current state will give us the most useful feedback. This approach likely means that we are looking for feedback primarily surrounding areas of narrative design, transformational design, and audience engagement.
As for the narrative itself, we talked this week about a variety of themes/settings for which the game could take place. At this time, we believe that abstracting the game away from the transformation will be beneficial in trying to make it more palatable for the audience. With that in mind, we talked about existing pieces of fiction that might inspire us.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the things mentioned (along with some popular properties to reference):
(Adult) Superheroes (Marvel)
Wizards/Witches (Harry Potter)
(Non-Adult) Superheroes/Super Mutants (X-men, Sky High, My Hero Academia)
Dungeoneering (Dungeons & Dragons)
RPGs that provide alternatives to combat (Undertale)
We may move forward with a slightly different direction than any of these ideas but we believe we have started along a beneficial path. We look forward to finalizing our 1/4s plans and then receiving feedback from faculty.
Thanks for reading,
James from STEMspire