This week we had the quarter presentation.
We had our client meeting on Monday as usual. During the meeting, we presented our design pillar and new plans to achieve our design goals, which is using narrative to help us make decisions during the design.
The story is about the Coventry Bombing, a real historical event in WWII. The code breakers received information and decoded successfully, which gave them a message saying that there would be a bombing. They soon figured out 3 suspicious bombing targets: London, Birmingham, Coventry. 2 days in prior to the bombing actually happened, they successfully captured the information again and decoded it, lead to a crucial information that the actual bombing target was Coventry. The code breakers tried to relate this important intelligence to Churchill, but Churchill decided to conceal the confidential information to avoid exposing that they broke the German cipher.
We divided the story into 5 different scenes and tried to use these scenes as component of our activity.
Though it’s lack of details our client loved the idea. And we all agreed on using this story as the narrative we will use for our project.
In the middle of the week we had the quarter walk around. The faculties visited our project room and listened to our summary presentation of the past 4 weeks. We received really helpful feedbacks, and they lead us to a lot of answers to questions and decisions in design. Like:
- Our presentation was confusing, people couldn’t understand what we’re doing.
We thought of this, since we’re doing a project which is a part of a bigger project running by our client. It was time consuming to communicate both projects and their relationship to our faculty, we tried to simplify but it didn’t work well.
- The emotion arc we presented confused them.
There are a lot of things happening. People were told our goal is to make the players feel smart by solving the code breaking puzzles, but later we presented a story with a lot of negative feelings. We didn’t explain well how do the other scenes serve our activity.
- People who already knew Coventry story will feel differently to those who didn’t.
They could understand the part of the emotional scenes better, however meanwhile they knew the ending so they thought that would block the feeling of smart and heroic. About this we’ll talk with our client and the most possible answer to it is we’ll still use historical events with fictional characters.
- The difficulty of the puzzles
We believe different people have different sensitivity to different kind of puzzles. We plan on playtest and iterate our puzzles a lot in the second half in the semester.
- We didn’t present our puzzles and roles
Mostly due to the time limit. The puzzles will be designed soon.
We had very useful meetings with our instructors afterwards. In the meeting we mainly made some important decisions for the future:
- List some questions that we have to clarify our clients’ thought and request, to help us make design decisions.
- Assign more specific roles in team to better distribute responsibility.
- Set milestones for the project in order to make the progress more clear.
- Finish research mode and get into produce mode.
- For everything we do, think of how it will push the project or help the project.
And we’re looking forward into the next feel weeks: Real work is ahead!
