As a team, we focused all of our efforts this week on refining our ideas for the project, refining our team’s branding, and preparing for our Quarter Presentations.
We started this week by meeting with faculty members both in the ETC and on main campus to gain some more insight into the development of a game about social issues. We split our efforts so that half of the team met with Jessica Hammer, a new faculty member here at the ETC, and the other half met with Paolo Pedercini, a faculty member on main campus CMU. Both of these meetings provided us with interesting insight into the development of games that deal with a social issue. A few of us also went to the playtesting workshop put on by Jessica Hammer and Mike Christel. This was very helpful in getting us thinking about the types of playtests we would need to set up this semester. Later in the week, we met with Jesse Schell and discussed our project and current ideas with him. He also gave us some very helpful advice. All of these meetings inspired our team conversations and pushed us to work even harder.
Janet, Lisa, Tim, and Yan continued researching social issues. We narrowed our research down to world hunger and economic inequality. We spent hours going to various charity websites and reaching out to them. The few charities that we did get into contact with, we asked what the core of the issue was and what challenges they, as a charity, were facing in trying to solve this issue. This led to some very interesting insights and new perspectives that we were not aware of. After our individual research, the four of us met and discussed what we had gleaned from our research and from calling charities. From this discussion, we pulled out 3 one-sentence statements about the state of the issues we researched and brought them to the rest of the team.
Our programmers, Ken and Alex set up our Unity account. Since our game will eventually be played by a large number of people, they prototyped a very basic network that could interact between devices. Jack, along with the other artists, received critiques on the first draft of our team branding. Following that, Jack continued to edit and refine our team’s logo, half sheet, and poster. We also took our team picture. Tim edited the photo, and it ended up being very silly.
We all came back together and produced a few new ideas, but also built upon the ideas we came up with last week. At the end of the week, we presented these ideas to our advisors and our client. The feedback was mixed, but we as a team felt that we found a direction that really inspired us. We began preparations for our Quarter Presentation on Monday. Next week we look forward to receiving feedback from the faculty during Quarters. We also cannot wait to begin implementing our ideas!