This week was really interesting for the team and a heck of a creative one as well. The week involved a lot of diverse things from trying to lay out a road for the semester ahead to running wild with imagination. All that to come in due course.
Research and Brainstorming
This was the core focus of the team for this week. We met a couple of times within the group to come up cool new ideas using the research from past weeks that could work for our clients. This involved everyone coming up with potentially two unique ideas for a potential experience/game for the festival and pitching it to the rest of the team. These ideas were twisted, turned and stretched by the team in every possible direction to polish them further. After this initial round of brainstorming we had around 15 new ideas on the table. After multiple rounds of scrutiny and selection this was reduced to 4 core ideas. At this point we took a slightly different approach, split the team up into four sub-teams each with an artist and a programmer. Each team prepared one of the four ideas and polished it further for presenting it to our clients.
Quarters Deliverable
We have started planning and working towards our quarter walk-around as well. Scott was working on polishing our website along with Stephanie and bringing it up and into a presentable state. He also polished the initial concept we had from our last week poster and logo designs and these should be ready by Monday morning for faculty feedback. The website is up and running but work is going on to put up all the content as well. This is quite a different project and not a conventional mobile or a PC game and requires us to understand the space for the festival in much greater detail.
Project Management
As a team we have also started following scrum in the team this week and a huge scrum board is being setup as well. We plan on having daily scrum meetings where each person updates on the 3 questions- what they worked on yesterday, what they plan to work on today and if they are blocked on someone else. This will help keep everyone updated about the project and keep it short so we can meet daily.
Client Visit
This Friday, Emily Treat from G4C came to Pittsburgh to meet with the team. We had put together a presentation to show the research that we had done in the past along with the new concepts that we came up with for potential games. The presentation is accessible here. We got valuable feedback from the Emily on these games and some mainly on what they are essentially looking for in the experience.
For Future
The team meet today and we have narrowed it down to 3 possible projects that we will be doing an initial prototype for. For now these are called Touch, Virus and Big Bang Theory. The team will prototype the technology as well as construct more detailed concepts from a game design perspective. Idea is to do a quick proof of concept on the technology end and see if it is even feasible for executing these game concepts on such a large scale. We would like to get a better handle on these before our next scheduled client call so we can pitch our 3 ideas in a more detailed way.
That’s it from Week 3 of head banging. See you all next week and have a nice weekend.
Mayank Grover