Sept 11, 2023 – Sept 17, 2023
This week our team was focused on preparing for our quarters presentation. Quarters is a great opportunity to present our game idea to the faculty and get some much welcomed feedback and suggestions.
Production
Instead of using Jira as our project management tool, we switch to Monday since it is more user friendly and straightforward. We felt that using Jira was too complicated to use and found that it discouraged some of our teammates from using it so we felt like this was the right move for our team.
Design
We have begun work on our team logo for Terratopia and here are some of the current drafts.
Narrowing down the idea
We decided as a team that in order to deliver a more complete game that it made sense for us to focus on one species instead of two and we felt that with the parameters we had been given and the research that was available, that the dolphin was the best choice. While researching issues relating to dolphins we came across two very important points, first was that there is an organization that has been conducting the longest research study on bottlenose dolphins in the world that is based in Sarasota, Florida and second is that this area of Florida is also home to an important ecosystem that the dolphins used to hunt called mangroves. We learned that these mangroves are habitat for many species including nurseries for many fish that dolphins feed on and are also carbon sinks, meaning they release carbon dioxide when they are destroyed. These two points provided us a direct link to both climate change and dolphins and set the foundation for our game moving forward.
Quarters
For quarters we started off by presenting the background of our project and the parameters our clients set for us. After we spoke about our idea to focus specifically on bottlenose dolphins and mangroves.
Overall the feedback we received was very positive and many of the faculty members thought that we had a solid direction and that they were looking forward to seeing how the game will progress.
Here are some of the more important questions that we were asked and that we plan to address:
- Playing as a dolphin has been done before, why doesn’t your client use these games?
- What makes our game different?
- How will we convey the use of echolocation?
- Will everything they see send back a signal?
- How are we going to show climate change over time?
- What exactly do we want the player to do and take away from the game?
- How can the player navigate the environment without getting sick?
Team Bonding
This week we had our team bonding outing. We decided to go to a new place downtown called the Puttery where you can play miniature golf inside. We had some pizza and then we were all surprised to find out that Yu Xi was actually really good at mini golf and crushed us all. It was a lot of fun and it was also interesting to see how they incorporated different gaming elements to keep score and keep the teams moving through the experience.
