athena

For Team Athena, the fourth week began with the faculty walk-around for the critique of the team poster, half sheet and logo which was outlined and drawn by the Ruchi and Luna. Jon Dessler and Shirley Yee provided valuable feedback regarding certain changes that were needed to be made to the poster which uses a stained-glass pattern to depict Goddess Athena. The team also discussed regarding the point system which needed to be implemented in the game since most of the demographic at Colonial School were really into high scores. The programming and design team also met up and discussed the first batch of art assets that were required from the artists for the final sprint before quarters and the playtest on Friday. The design brainstormed various specific details regarding the game with respect to UI, level design and in-depth analysis of various techniques of displaying a high score which came across to the children.

 

On Tuesday, the team also planned for the sprint before quarters with various tasks and deadlines set. The programmers were tasked with developing the working core of the game with AI and core gameplay a major priority. Luna and Milind integrated and merged their code and Kanishk worked on the sound manager and also the animation of exploding buildings. Unfortunately, we are still testing whether the iPad processing unit can handle so many game objects which need to be created while the building is being destroyed. The prototype was ready on Tuesday with placeholder assets and audio. Luna and Ruchi also worked on finalizing the poster and half sheet after feedback had been given on Monday. The team also talked to the client and filled them in on the progress of the project during the last few days.

 

 

On Wednesday, the first priority art assets were finalized by the design and programming team and Elaine and Ruchi started working on the voxel art style which had been finalized earlier. Elaine also completed her work on the buildings which were to be used in the game and the buildings were integrated into the prototype. The team also discussed on what plans they have for the team photo. The picture below gives us a rough look at how the characters and environment would look at the end of the production cycle:

 

On Thursday, Elaine, Ruchi and Kanishk prepared the documents and the team for the playtest which was to be conducted at the Colonial School on Friday. The programmers also added the final feature to the prototype to be shown at the playtest by working on the power-up functionality and integrating it into the game. The final working prototype was ported to the iPads. The designers also designed two additional levels for the game and Ruchi confirmed the final look of the poster and the half sheet. All the tasks planned for the week were included in our prototype which was great.

 

On Friday, Ruchi and Elaine also worked on the voxel art for the team photo. After the morning work, the team left for Colonial School where he had our playtest with some of the quieter and delayed kids in the demographic. The playtest was very useful as it brought the realities of working with a wide age and development range. The team first spent ten minutes observing the children playing and noted down their playing style as well as how they interacted and reacted to the games they were playing. After that, we made them play our game with mixed results. The younger children weren’t able to keep up with the game and felt lost. The older children instinctually beat the game but didn’t care for it. The team unpacked all the events that occurred during the playtest and discussed their ideas and opinions on the ride back home.

 

Week 3: Playtesting, Client Confirmation, And Faculty Expert Input

So, this week we were at a funny juncture in terms of deciding project pillars, scope, and focus, while simultaneously digitally prototyping an experience into existence. It’s chopping down a forest while occasionally climbing a tree and asking whether we’re even going in the right direction. We asked ourselves that question, our clients that question, and a lot of faculty that question.

We knew needed to test how the paper prototype was translating into a tablet interface, but that could take a million different forms. We also needed to answer these big questions that we were really worried about. Risk analysis is fun, because it’s the moment where you step away from blue-sky design and say:

Risk chart, on right in blue: a.k.a., Our Worst Nightmares

“If everything caught fire and fell apart tomorrow, how would it happen? What’s going to ruin us? What are we most afraid of?”

Fun stuff.

At the end of the previous week, we’d made a risk analysis of such questions. I think it really came through how little we knew what to expect of our audience.

What if they barely knew how to use the tablets? What if the games they played didn’t include any strategy whatsoever? What if we accidentally made a game with an aesthetic they hated?

What is our main client really trying to do, here?

 

And how does faculty respond to what we have so far, given that they are all experts in different arenas?

All of these questions enabled us to design our first playtest and prototype in order to quash as many possible on the first go—and see what was unquashable; what needed to be fixed the most. The playtest was a mix of A/B testing (for art style), observation (to get a sense for whether our hypothesis about control and power was correct, what UI was intuitive for the kids, and any other patterns of behavior), interview (brief, about game choices and what they did and did not like about our game), paper prototype playtesting, and usability testing the digital interface.

 

A lot for one session! But we got five lovely kiddos in from the larger class and an hour later had a lot of questions answered that we didn’t have initially.

The big one was a sense of gratitude that we didn’t “design down” when ideating—that we tried to make a game that was fun for us. Because the kids picked the board game up right away, and even ended up combo-ing us multiple times. Any preconceived notions about what it means to be in a social-emotional therapeutic program and on an IEP quickly vanished.

Our kids don’t button mash, they strategize.

Our kids have no patience for shoddy design work, and have some insightful things to share in terms of what mechanics are working and not working, and why.

Our kids understand that flashing elements on a tablet means interactivity.

So, that risk assessment was put to rest.

Now, here’s what’s not working: we had a risk assessment that basically said, “what if kids don’t feel powerful or a sense of control when playing this game?” For the board game, they did feel powerful, often making sound effects and marching the dinosaur across the page to simulate stomping. But the tablet UI was a totally different story. It felt flat, they didn’t react at all, and the sound effects totally vanished.

We unpacked as a team why this might be happening, and came up with a new risk assessment focus for the following week. With some very helpful faculty feedback, we shifted our design pillar from “juicy”—which really, for the time being, belongs under the much more important goal of feeling powerful, regardless of how we get there (we’re looking at self-determination theory to see if there are other aspects to this we may have missed, thanks to Dave Culyba).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our chosen art style, decided by a mix of A/B testing and team capability as a tiebreaker

Instead, we tried “stickiness/replayability” on for size as a pillar. But, after a conversation with the client, it became clear that our game’s goal was not necessarily to remain ONLY sticky. The kids have access to the entire app store during free choice time, including games with companies and corporations that out-scope us in terms of how sticky and replayable their games are. We would be competing with all hundreds of thousands of them. And part of the appeal of free choice is this frenetic choosing, this buffet/smorgasboard of options. We will be lucky if kids play our game for ten minutes a week for more than a month.

But we want to see kids playing ours for increasing amounts of time as our project progresses, and we don’t want to see them switching from ours to an inappropriate game such as zombies or killing.

Our more direct goal is to compete to scratch the same itch as some of the more violent games the kids download, especially blood-and-guts shooters. So we’ve changed a pillar to “More Sticky than the Shooters,” to see if we can serve as this alternative.

 

We got more helpful faculty feedback, as well. Brenda Harger encouraged us to think about the broader picture, which is part of what prompted the phone call with our client to clarify a deeper reason for making the game. Problem-solving is something that has come up as a strong secondary goal to minimizing the desire to play violent games.

 

Chris Klug advised us in ways to fold in story elements into a game for an audience that doesn’t play games with a lot of traditional game narrative (it has to do with success revealing themed elements that show more about the world over time).

 

Mike Christel advised on play testing as well as game mechanics and why perhaps the tablet was not translating the board game as well as we hoped.

 

All in all, a fantastic week for feedback and reflection before moving on to explain our reasoning at quarters.

After setting up the roles and getting early pre-production done in the first week, Week 2 began on Monday, with the team doing further research on how reading games are implemented and best practices to carry out in order to make a game suited for children in the age range of 7-9. The team also took the games which were deemed “useful” during research and played them to search for useful features, interactions, themes, art styles and other tid-bits. Having finished the research, the team sat for an official brainstorming session with 15 game ideas put forth and ideating and combining the best of all to come up with a final vision for the team to follow. The team also utilized Jesse Schell’s deck for guidance with the gamification’s core elemental tetrad of Aesthetic, Story, Technology and Mechanics coming very handy. The team also individually filled the self-evaluations and sent it our mentor, Shirley Saldamarco.

 

On Tuesday, the team continued with further ideation and brainstorming and coming up with three solid ideas to take into consideration as the game to be made for the semester. The team met with Jesse Schell with the problem statement and the three mock ideas with his input coming in very handy. Jesse stated that we should first build the toy and then carry forward with it, with the core objective being to make the game fun and immersive and then to fold in reading later. The team also sat down and set-up formal roles by filling in the RACI chart with each member being the Responsible, Accountable, Consultant and Informed for each task.

 

 

Wednesday was a comparatively less productive day with the highlight being that the team honed in on the single idea they were all excited to work with. The high-level details were discussed and voted on with the game should be fun and practical to develop being taken into consideration. The afternoon and evening were spent filling the forms and registering fingerprints for background clearances so the team members could interact with children.

 

On Thursday, the team came in early in order to cover up for lost ground on the previous day. The team storyboarded the entire game with various features, mechanics and interactions discussed and finalized. The team also developed a paper prototype with many iterations and rules added to make the game challenging but also fun and engaging. The team also prepared for playtesting this paper prototype with the students of Colonial School and highlighted their fears, doubts and questions on how it will be received. The programmers and designers also met up and made a basic requirements list and prepared a basic art assets list for the artists to work on.

 

 

 

On Friday, the team started a primitive version of scrum with each person writing down the first tasks to be performed in the development cycle and the first official sprint of the  semester. The designers met and discussed on how a basic version of the prototype to be developed should look and sample outlines of how the grid should look was designed. The design team also finalized that the game will have a hexagonal grid system for movement. The team also had a team building dinner with Elaine hosting an awesome feast.