Hello!
This week was dedicated to developing our project further based on the feedback from 1/4s and/or mentioned in the previous post.
Meeting with Chris Klug
Angelina and Hannah (our narrative designers) met with Chris Klug on Monday to how to go about creating the narrative for the project. Chris was able to advise on the current state as well as give us some major pitfalls to be wary of while we progress the story. One of the things Chris suggested was that we see about meeting with a social psychologist to figure out how we should be addressing some of our questions/preparing questions for players. The general idea behind this is that we may not be attempting to be completely transparent with the topic we are addressing. If our lesson to 8th graders is too transparent and/or shallow, they me be significantly less engaged in our game.
Advisor Meeting(s)
Later in the afternoon on Monday was our advisor meeting with Mike and Ricardo. We were able to discuss with them the combined feedback from 1/4s and decided on some of the direction, as well as some future deliverables throughout the coming weeks. For the direction, we felt the space/sci-fi theme was still relevant to our project and decided to continue with this setting in mind. Our advisors also expressed that while they seemed to be interested in our content, it was still very vague and conceptual. We at this point had some art assets and narrative outlines, but didn’t necessarily have too much of an actual game. They encouraged us to make sure we were prototyping and actually able to test our ideas. With that in mind, our goal for week 5 is to have a playable prototype to start demonstrating what gameplay would actually be like. With next Monday at 3:00 PM as our planned playtesting session, we began to distribute work to see what we could develop in time.
Another resource/topic that was brought up during our meeting by our advisors was D.U.C.C. This resource “was founded to teach students in grades 1-6 about digital literacy and critical comprehension skills to foster independent thinking in a non-politicized manner.” While not the same audience as our project (1st – 6th graders vs 8th graders), we still were able to identify some parallels between our project and this one. Below is a video we watched from D.U.C.C.
Team Bonding
We also completed our team bonding on Wednesday the 21st. We were able to eat food and play some games as a team, which was a nice way to get closer as a team.
Moving Forward
Below are some examples of the assets we had created for this week. Moving forward we will develop these further and start playtesting with them as paper prototypes. Also below is our current design for our poster.
Thanks for reading,
James from STEMspire