[Week 2] Development Blog: AN IDEA OUT OF THIS WORLD

Week 1 went pretty well. Now was the time for brainstorming.

We did not have class on Labor day, so we could not meet on Monday. So, we moved our faculty meeting on Wednesday, just before the client meeting.

On Tuesday, we started brainstorming. Since our target audience was middle and high school students, and also since we did not want to make our game political, we thought of going with an outer-space aesthetic. In that way, we can make the game visually appealing and also, we can exaggerate the actions and their consequences.
We wanted to somehow convert the concept of Census into a video game. We started brainstorming on how we could do that. We considered different factors, and eventually came to a conclusion that Census directly affects the health, education and infrastructure of a particular region. Therefore, making a management simulation game made a lot of sense. We locked on the idea for the day and waited to see how the faculty and client like it.

On Wednesday, we first had our postponed faculty meeting. Both Ricardo and Scott liked the idea. They liked our idea and gave us more suggestions on how we could efficiently use it. They also suggested us what questions we should ask our client. In the afternoon, we had our client meeting, and she liked our idea. She mentioned that she is familiar with such games and she has played games like SimCity before. She also liked the fact that we were going with an alien planet. We asked her if we were swaying away from the video competition, but she told us to focus on the game itself, and not worry about the competition. In the evening, as a part of the ETC tradition, we had team dinner at a Chinese Hot Pot place.

On Thursday, we iterated more on our idea and tried to find how to make Census the center point in our game. We felt like more population will directly relate to more money, which made sense, but may not be the strongest point when it comes to census. The process of brainstorming was ever-growing. We also came up with a name of our game – Space County. We also made a scrum board to keep track of our tasks easily.