This week we have been focused on setting up the framework for our project and how we are organizing our team work structure.
We started this week by attending a workshop as a team that helped us learn how to narrow down our brainstorming ideas and shift our focus onto one or two ideas. This led to interesting discussions about the goals of our project as well as the goals of Games for Change as a movement. As a team, we solidified our problem statement, identified the audience that we are trying to reach, and set our goals for this project. With all this in mind, we went back and developed our ideas more and selected 3 to pitch to our client.
After pitching our ideas to Emily, she gave us some really great feedback and suggestions to help our project develop even more. She said we were on the right track, but we just needed to refine our ideas a bit more. So as a team, we broke off and continued to work hard at refining our ideas. We discussed previous Games for Change games and analyzed their design. We discussed potentially partnering with a charity so that our game can have real world effects.
Our producers have been hard at work this week setting up the timeline for our project and setting goals for the team. They taught the team Scrum and how we will be using it in our project. They set up a scrum board for us and began planning the sprint goals for our project. In addition, our artist Jack has been busy working on creating our team logo as well as other pieces of branding for our project throughout the semester.
We ended the week with another meeting with our advisors Ralph and Brenda. They gave us some helpful advice. This weekend we are going to push to really refine our ideas so that next week we can bring them to the client and begin prototyping and development.
Hello again! This week has been a week of storms–both literal and figurative. The polar vortex produced some blustery winter days and a few snow showers this week. With temperatures dipping below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, we kept warm by brainstorming on hot social topics.
We started our week off with our first client meeting with Emily from Games for Change. We had numerous questions for her about the festival and she provided us with great insights. After our meeting with Emily, we decided to focus more on the social impact that we are trying to create with our game. Each of us chose a social issue that we thought was important, such as homelessness and unemployment, social and economic segregation, or sustainability, and did some preliminary research. The research we conducted ignited many interesting conversations amongst the team about the tough social issues in our modern world. We each presented the research of our social issues and we discussed them as a team, trying to get to the core of the issues. Having discussed these issues, we focused our brainstorming on what message we were trying to get across to the players, and then, with that in mind, what kind of game experience would best suit that message.
On Wednesday we had another team bonding event. We threw a mini surprise party for Lisa’s birthday and celebrated with cake! Then we watched a documentary recommended by Ralph and Brenda called The Gleaners and I. Though this documentary was not directly related to the social issues that we had been researching, it did inspire some new thoughts and ways of thinking about our own social issues.
Our producers have been very busy this week. They created a spreadsheet with everyone’s roles and responsibilities clearly laid out and created an accountability system to ensure that we all stay on track. After our client meeting, they began looking at the whole semester and laying out our schedule of production. Our client recommended that we come and visit New York City to get a tour of the space where the festival will be held. So our producers have also been working hard to plan a team trip with our advisors in the next two weeks.
We ended our week with an early morning meeting with Ralph and Brenda and solidified a few ideas for our project. Next week we will pitch these ideas to Emily at Games for Change and narrow down our focus even more. We plan to conduct deeper research into our short list of social issues as well as begin to design some of the gameplay elements.
Oh hello there! We are Team URSA and we are working on the Real World Live Game for the Games for Change Festival. We are a team made up of programmers, artists, producers, and a sound designer.
We started the week off by rearranging our workspace to create the best environment for our team. Our co-producers, Janet and Lisa, divvied up their responsibilities and the team proceeded with introductions. We came up with our team name, URSA, on that first day. Ursa refers to the constellation Ursa Major, or the big bear. Ursa Major contains within it the seven bright stars that make up the big dipper, including the North Star, which has guided people the world over for centuries. Since there are seven of us on our team and we are hoping to lead the way in social change with our project, the name seemed a perfect fit. We concluded our first day with team bonding over dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.
The week continued with a few initial brainstorming sessions to get the juices flowing about our topic. We discussed social issues that we could tackle with our game as well as ideas for games that could be played by a large group of people. We assigned team roles and responsibilities and reached out to our clients at Games for Change. We finalized our team’s core meeting hours and began working on a team logo.
We began Friday with a meeting with our faculty advisors, Ralph Vituccio and Brenda Harger. They provided an interesting perspective on our project and got us thinking about our project in new ways. We immediately began researching and brainstorming more topics to apply to our project. We also decided that URSA would be an acronym for Understanding Real Social Action. Our client got back in touch with us and we set our first meeting time with them on Monday of next week.
We are all so excited to be on this project and can’t wait to see what this semester holds for us!