Week 1
Hi!
We’re team Enigma. We’re a team formed by 6 ETC first-year students, and very excited about our project.
Our members are:
Hyun Jong (Howard) Won
Victoria Yom
Xuefan Zhou
Xuejun (Sally) Wang
Yunhao (Magian) Li
Yutong (Eliza) Zhang
The description of our project is:
As a followup to Rosenstrasse, Jessica Hammer and her collaborator Moyra Turkington are designing another War Birds game about women’s history. The new game is about the women codebreakers of Bletchley Park, who helped crack the Enigma codes during WWII. The game contrasts these women’s experiences in wartime with the very different trajectories their lives took after the war. A few continued in cryptography, some married their colleagues and retired into matrimony, and still others had to tell their families and friends that they’d been secretaries and return to a far more confining role. The role of these women was not publicly known until 1974 and was not honored until 2009. The game explores these turning points in their lives.
One key design goal is for the players to understand the joy of codebreaking and the thrill of contributing to a larger cause. In order to accomplish this, we would like to create an experience that makes players a) collaborate, b) solve puzzles, and c) feel heroic and smart. Players will interact with the experience multiple times over the course of a 3-5 hour game, and each session should be relatively short to play. While we would like it to capture the aesthetics of the period, we do not want a simulation of the Enigma machines. You should not assume that players know anything about codebreaking, and we are not trying to teach codebreaking concepts. The goals here are aesthetic ones.
The ETC team will create two versions of this experience. First, they will create an experience that can be distributed on a tablet. Second, they will create a physical device of some kind that accomplishes the same goals, which we can take with us to festivals, conferences, and other events. The two versions may be very similar, or they may be different; it is up to the team.
As part of the experience design, the team will develop a look and feel for the entire game, including fonts, color palettes, logos, etc. We plan to create the rest of the game materials to be consistent with the team’s art direction.
We had our first team meeting and decided our team name: Enigma. The name looks simple, but it’s interestingly formed by our members’ names:
Eliza
xuejuN
magIan
hyun jonG Won
yoM
xuefAn
We came up with some ideas for our role distribution, the aesthetics of our game, and some guesses of what are we really going to do.
After meeting with our advisors, we got the basic idea of how the team will run during this semester, and some immediate things to be done:
Meet with client: Jessica & Moyra
Preparation for the questions to ask the client
Pre-production process for TEAM / EVERYONE
Distribute role and responsibility
We also got some important time points in the semester.
The meeting with advisors was on Thursday. We immediately set up the meeting on next Monday with Jessica and left the assignment to do some individual research.
To summarize, week 1 is pretty to get things kickoff and ongoing. We should meet both our advisors and clients earlier, to fasten our process of settling down in a brand new semester. But we got great help and lot of useful information. Definitely, the following week we will be more clear and productive.
