Progress
In week 6 we turned on the engine and moved forward to producing.
Following the suggestions from the instructors:
- 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.
With the feedback from quarters, we asked questions to our client and got very important answers which would lead us to make future design decisions：
- A clarification of relationship between our experience and the bigger experience (figure below). We can design an experience that stands alone itself and can be played itself, and they will fit it into the bigger experience later.
- Use historical event results, fictional characters and storylines is fine.
- Digital props, game can be played with just printed material and App.
- The number of scenes and roles: we can decide according to our design need.
Also we divided our designers into 3 different roles:
Experience designer (Sally), who’s in charge of the players’ experience, the flow of the whole experience, the form of each activity, and how the emotion arc goes.
Puzzle designer (Howard), who’s going to design puzzles in the puzzle solving scenes.
Narrative designer (Victoria), who’s going to write the detailed story out and design the roles with background stories individually.
Challenges
Although we divided the design team into different roles, the intersection in different roles make the responsibility not very clear, and people didn’t know where exactly to start. We still had to spend long time in meetings to keep everyone in the same page.
Besides, the design of the prop in the App is still waiting for puzzles to come out. Our programmers built a basic structure of the App, however it really needs more information to go forward.
Decisions & Plans
As results of this weeks work, we had an experience map of players to illustrate roughly how the players will play and feel during the game.
Also we had a lot of mechanics of puzzles that could be potential puzzles in the game.
Narrative wise, we playtested and decided the sequence of information that will be discovered by the players, which is time+bomb — 3 suspicious — Coventry.
Our plan next week is to get feedbacks from our client on the three aspects, and make a demo version of whole experience to playtest.
