Week 6
Hey, welcome back. You remember in our last blog when we said that part of the week was easy and the other part was difficult? Yeah, well, this week was similar.
But instead of easy and hard, it was hard and harder.
The hard part of this week proved to be finishing off our second week-long prototype. We had lots of story/world questions about this prototype and about how it would actually work as a user journey and we could not pin down answers that we all agreed on. Couple that with admittedly losing some interest (especially in comparison to our first prototype) as we neared the middle of the week meant starting Tuesday with a bunch of disjointed pieces of a game experience that could not pass as playable. We righted the ship a little bit with a team meeting Tuesday morning, laying out what was necessary to get our build playable all the way through.
As Wednesday finished, we felt confident putting someone in the chair to test the core mechanics of the experience and get the idea across of what we would do long-term with more time on this concept.
Like last week, making a quick 180 to a new idea again turned out to be a really tough task. We seemed to be brainstorm-fatigued and the last thing any of us wanted to do was have another blue sky meeting. We ended up sleeping on some ideas Wednesday night and then locking ourselves in our project room for an hour on Thursday morning until we decided on a basic game system for prototype 3.
We approached these ideas differently than we did with the first two – instead of focusing on the chair’s mechanics, we thought about fantasies, game-play styles and pushing the boundary of what this experience could mean. We hoped that doing something completely different from the first two would provide us with some unique takeaways that could be carried through to the final experience even if we did not choose our last idea as the final.
After coming to a conclusion (note how I did not say answer) around midday Thursday, we spent the rest of the week making the basic interactions of the experience and diving a little deeper into the actual story. This prototype, unlike the previous two, could potentially function in a more turn-based way, so we started chipping away at the question: what do you do when you’re waiting?
Some of those discussions naturally led into new ideas which actually ignited one of our teammates to take on a little passion project with the chair that will actually function as another prototype for us to pitch and think about moving on (we figured if it is good enough for Google, the passion project is good enough for us).
Week 6 has left us a little dizzy with ideas and deadlines, but hopefully we will be able to accomplish some daring feats in Week 7 to get some momentum going into Halves.