January 27-31, 2014

After a nod of approval from our client representative for three rough concepts for a golf game for connected TVs, we spent much of the past week polishing each concept and assessing its feasibility.

We began to understand that while each game design could achieve some of our client’s goals—design for quick, casual play, increased engagement,
options for multiplayer—they targeted dierent audiences. An arcade combat golf variant attracted a broad audience that might not be interested in traditional golf. A physics puzzle variant served an audience that was looking for a novel experience or an addicting Angry Birds style challenge. Improving a traditional game of golf appealed to existing fans of golf and golf games.

Since our client wants an alpha deliverable by mid-semester, we scrutinized each idea to see what we needed to do to realize the concept and what could actually get done in less than five weeks of production. We drafted user stories for all the possible features we imagined, sorte these by priority, and for each design selected the handful of stories that were the minimum viable product—the fewest number of features the game needed to be the game we wanted to create.

With a sense of what we needed to create, we translated each of these core stories into discrete and quantiable tasks for each team member. We added up the total number of hours and measured them against our goal of delivering a gold spike—in this case, a roughly playable version of the game—in the next few weeks.

At the end of the week, we presented our polished ideas and plans for execution to the team from the Oce of the Chief Creative Ocer. While they liked each idea and praised our focus on the player, they surprised us at the end of the meeting: instead of asking us to work on the idea we like the most or the idea that seemed to appeal to the existing audience, they asked us to pursue the most ambitious idea for just a week and see where we could get.

We move forward into the week ahead with a plan: get something working. Assemble the roughest possible version of the physics puzzle game we want to create and have it ready to show o for Friday. Anything else is gravy.

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