We started this week with our Quarters presentation to the faculty at the ETC. During Quarters, the faculty visits each project room and each team presents the work they have done up to that point. We presented the ideas that we had prepared to pitch to our client. The faculty gave us so much great feedback. Immediately following Quarters, our team met to interpret the feedback we received and see what feedback we could implement into our project. It became clear to us that a few of our ideas just were not feasible or had too many restrictions. But due to that feedback, we were able to focus in on what was feasible for our project, which pushed us forward in a new direction.
Early in the week, we heard back from our client. She liked the social issues that we presented to her and gave us the green light to move forward with these issues. Yan, our game designer, began coming up with new game ideas that were inspired by the approved social issue.
Thanks to the feedback from the faculty during Quarters, we decided that it would be more beneficial to use HTML5 and cell phones to implement our game. This opened up our project schedule a bit more as we would not have to submit an app to the Apple App store. Our programmers began researching ways to use HTML5 and tested the capabilities of HTML5 on a phone so that once we had a good idea that was based in the approved social issue, we could begin prototyping as soon as possible.
Our producers spent much of the week figuring the logistics of when and where exactly our game will be taking place during the Games for Change festival. They also organized a meeting for us to reflect on how our team had been functioning over the last 5 weeks and to bring up ideas for how we could potentially do things differently. This helped our team to refocus and keep moving forward.
Friday was a day full of meetings. We first met with our advisors who were joined by Dave Culyba. Dave provided us with very helpful advice on creating a game for a festival and specifically for the Games for Change festival. Immediately following that, we had a conference call with our client. From that call, we decided that the social issue we would design our game around would be World Hunger and the sub-issues contained within that. We felt that as an issue, there was much more that we could pull from to create a truly meaningful game. Later that day, we also met with Melanie Lam who helped us shape the way we are thinking about the project. She also helped us to really define the space in which we are working to design this game.
Next week we plan to continue to investigate world hunger so that we can hit the ground running with prototyping and production, and we cannot wait!