Month: February 2019

This week saw a big step in the development, specifically because we’re moving into the stage that everyone has produced enough content for us to start connecting the different pieces we’ve made individually into one more cohesive app. We’ve interfaced a lot with each other, helped each other interface with content that other team members created, and helped players interface with the app.

The design of the game hasn’t gone through many huge changes this week, but we have been experimenting with the level of interaction players could potentially have with the characters in the game. Once again, we went to playtest night to get more data. We brought three text conversations to playtest night: one was a conversation with the player character’s father to decide whether or not to go to grad school, which only had one choice for the player (and therefore only one interactive moment), but it was a meaningful one. The second was a conversation where an old friend asked to pay you to store some of their things in your home, which had many choices, albeit not extremely significant ones. The third was a conversation with your addict sister, whose children were being taken away from her, and the player had to decide to either take her kids or let them go into the foster system. This conversation also had many choices, though the outcomes of them were much more significant. We asked playtesters to assess their feelings of freedom and satisfaction in the different conversations, regardless of the subject matter. Judging by the data we received, it seemed that players didn’t care so much about the nature of the decisions they had to make, but having any choice was better than having none. There were also some testers who were uncomfortable with the conversation with the addict sister, due to the very serious and heavy nature of the conversation and that no choice seemed like a very good answer. This is a feeling we want players to have, since these emotions best convey the struggle that those in poverty face, though this reaction has prompted us to save the majority of these types of conversations for later in the game, when there is less of a danger of players abandoning the game because it’s too heavy, when in truth they had only experienced a small, heavier than average slice of it.

Another question we’re still trying to answer is what the overarching goal of the game is. The strongest contenders are to either have no specific goal and see how well players do over a predetermined period of time or to have the game progress through the whole span of a GoFundMe fundraiser. The downside of the former is that our game may too closely mirror Spent, which has the same goal and play process. The downside of the latter is that it may reduce the needs of people in poverty to purely financial, and that all decisions boil down to money, when in reality these people live so much more complex lives. We plan on testing the use of a GoFundMe App as a relationship bank in the next phase of playtesting, so we can find out if players read it more as a social or financial indicator.

Aside from these major decisions, the design team has written more conversations that will take place in the texting app, which have been implemented into the game. The flow of the game has also been created; the game will be divided into three chunks, each starting with a news notification and ending with three conversations (two over text and one over email) that the player can play through in whichever order they please. Which conversations will happen in which chunk has also been decided.

As mentioned earlier, the programmers have begun to interface more with each other this week. The texting app is finished, work has been done on the player character profile (which internally keeps track of the player’s status with their finances and relationships), bank app, and the database that will keep track of player progress and all possible interactions the player could have with other characters in the app. The programmers have been working this week to connect these parts of the app into one cohesive final product. These connections also include connecting the work the designers do with the programming. The programmers will continue to work on this next week as well.

In the art world, work has been done on the layout of the news and email apps, figuring out exactly how and where information will be displayed for the players, as well as the various color schemes and art style.

We’re moving into halves territory, and while we still definitely have our work cut out for us, we feel like we’re on a good path to have a satisfactory amount of work done by the time halves comes in a week. We’ve made a lot of progress in development, and we’re confident that the faculty will realize that when we present the work we’ve done so far.

This week saw the continuation of development, but also saw a number of shifts in our design decisions based on feedback from playtesters and advisers. Though we didn’t expect the final visions of our game to change so much in just one week, we’re confident that our changes do not add significantly to the scope of the game, and will altogether result in a better end product.

The first event of the week that really changed the way we thought about the game was Sabrina Culyba coming in to play the original Poverty Spiral and learn about our interpretation for the mobile platform. As you may remember, Sabrina Culyba is the author of The Transformational Framework, and thus is an expert in using games as a tool to create change in the players. She was excited to work with us, and really brought in a new, fresh perspective of The Poverty Spiral.

A big takeaway we got from her was that as it stands now, our game focuses very much on a few individuals’ lives, instead of focusing on the systemic issues that let poverty pervade in our society. In other words, if we really want players to understand the big picture impact of poverty, we need to make some changes. We aren’t fully sure of any large changes we want to make to fix this, but for now we’re putting more focus on social impact in the news app and shifting the causes of the various situations in the game to focus more on external reasons rather than any of the characters involved being clearly to blame.

Another aspect of the game that Sabrina pointed out was the time taken to play. The time span of three days to play the game was something many faculty members were wary of due to scope reasons, but Sabrina had a different reason for disliking it: it makes the game harder for different players to discuss when they’re done. If two or more players who are friends need three days to finish the game, it’s very hard to guarantee that they’ll both be in the same room when they start and when they finish, making face-to-face discussion about the different decisions they made improbable. Sabrina suggested that we switch to an hour-long game that can be played all at once, players can compare face to face how the characters they played ended the game. We agree with her, and will now focus on an hour-long game. We suspect many faculty members will be very relieved by this decision.

Sabrina spoke highly of the board game version of The Poverty Spiral, and one thing she liked about that version was the spiral itself; it gave a very visual representation of how well a player was doing. Sabrina played as the homeless character, the most disadvantaged character in the game, and was very engaged by how much farther back in the spiral she moved, as well as how satisfying it made the victories when she moved farther out of the spiral, even if it was only for a brief moment and futile in the long run. In our version, statuses of finances and relationships are represented primarily numerically, which is much harder to visualize than the spiral. We agree that Sabrina has a point here (as she so often does). For now we’re going to represent the positions on the spiral with bars, but may change that later.

The final big takeaway we had from Sabrina was that a home screen may not be a good idea. Sabrina pointed out it may look empty if we can’t make more than five or six apps, and the current UI is so close to what one would find on an iOS device that players would frequently press the real home button and leave the game by accident. Incidents like this would likely take players out of the experience, so we’re going to switch to a notifications menu, which will more concisely display the different kinds of interactions players can do, while allowing for a more empty list of possible tasks if necessary.

Sabrina left the team a little overwhelmed with the novelty, validity, and magnitude of her feedback, leaving us wondering how we can change our design plan in so many ways, though our worry has calmed as we’ve invented solutions to the problems Sabrina discovered, and we realize that the scope of the project has not significantly increased, as we feared it may have to.

We learned a lot from playtesting the game with Sabrina, but just playtesting once wasn’t enough. On Wednesday night, the team took a trip up to main campus for our first playtest night. We got several undergrads to play two different stories from our mobile version of the game, currently in the form of the prototype we had for quarters. We came armed with a google form and got some great feedback. They related to the recent college grad character (about whom both of the situations we brought were written), and many understood the game’s central theme of poverty without being explicitly told that the game was about poverty. The big thing that didn’t land so well with them was that the interface and UI resembled that of iOS so closely that players often wanted to perform the actions they’d perform on their phones outside the game, like typing custom responses to messages, but they could not, because six people can’t replicate everything Apple has done in the span of five weeks. This further supported what Sabrina said about how we should change art styles, albeit for a different reason.

Development continued to progress this week. We figured out the code architecture for the app, and now know exactly how the apps all link together programmatically as well as how the decisions the player makes will affect their character’s profile and the future of the player’s experience. A lot of work has gone into developing these large-scale systems in the game, like app callback functions, middleware, view control and databases in which the content will be stored. More small-scale functions have also been programmed, like progression between situations within one app, and the display of texts within the texting app. A lot is still yet to come here, especially in the way of interaction, but we’ve put a lot of work into laying the foundation of the game.

Our designers have also been busy making the changes Sabrina pointed out, as well as creating more content for the text, news, and email apps. The designers have also been discussing when to end the game and how to incorporate privilege. Both of these have some proposed solutions; Dana, our client, proposed that the game can focus on the period of time that a GoFundMe campaign runs to get the player character something like a car, and the game starts and ends with that fundraiser. The designers have also discussed implementing privilege like a premium, limited currency in the game; in the event of difficult decisions, sometimes a third, obviously great decision will be available to the player, but they have to spend privilege points to use it. Privilege is very limited and precious in this game, forcing players to think carefully about when they use it.

Our artist has been revamping the art style of the game, changing it from one that mimics iOS. After conducting copious amounts of research, she proposed a style with a deep purple background, like in the board game, and UI with rough edges. Our client was very satisfied with her proposal, and we will likely take that style into the final game.

At the end of the week was the final major event, when Dana, our client, proposed that we change the name of the game. She proposed a few names, like Give Back the Refrigerator, which was perhaps the most memorable one, but we agreed on a new name proposed by the client that we all agreed was the best choice: Broke. It’s easily understandable, impactful, and short enough to appear under an app icon, and so we are now the developers of Broke.

So, our game is Broke. Despite the despair of the name, we’re stronger than ever coming out of this week, and are ready to give this new version of the game everything we’ve got.

This week was a big one for us, since we had our quarters presentation, during which we would show several ETC faculty members exactly what we’d accomplish so far and get feedback. This was also the week when we transitioned from pure research and design to development.

Our quarters presentation was the first thing we did this week, for which we prepared a short albeit densely packed presentation and a prototype of the texting app for the game. The presentation was made to give faculty a brief introduction into what the board game version of The Poverty Spiral does and how we plan to transfer that to a virtual phone. The prototype played through one section of dialogue, focusing on one situation card for the elderly character, in which the player’s son was kicked out by his wife due to a drinking problem, and players would have to decide whether to take in their son or not. Some faculty liked our game, praising our concept and player interactions. Some faculty didn’t like the nonlinear dialogue, citing that sometimes they would personally say something other than the pre-written responses. Some faculty thought we set our scope to be too big, prompting us to scale down to a one day experience with three playable characters, instead of a three to four day experience with six playable characters.

Now that we have the opinions of many faculty members recorded, we have started the programming for the app. Most of the work done on that front this week was figuring out the overall architecture of the app, researching how best to send push notifications on different operating systems, scaling the UI for any screen size, system design, data storage, and basic interactions of messages in the texting app.

A design document is also in the works for our game, which is listing the different content and interactions of the game so far.

We’ve also started to write dialogue for one playable character’s story (the recent college graduate), mapping how different decisions would affect their finances, relationships, and health. The situation cards have also been organized into piles corresponding to which character will experience those situations in the app.

While all these parts of the game were started, we did end the week with one finished product, and that was the team picture, shown below.

We’ve learned a lot this week about where our product stands and in what direction it’s currently going, and while it’s going to take more meetings with various faculty to make sure we head in the best possible direction, we have high hopes that we’re laying the foundation for something that will help a lot of people’s stories be told for the first time.

This was a slower week for Team Fortitude, since extremely cold weather and snow cost us two days of development. Nevertheless, we have made significant progress on our game, especially in finalizing our application of Sabrina Culyba’s Transformational Framework, and putting together the first prototype of our game.

The team finished reading the Transformational Framework, and went to a workshop led by the author, Sabrina Culyba. We were able to apply these principles of the framework to The Poverty Spiral, which we converted into a poster, shown below.

Sabrina Culyba also said she was interested in helping us out throughout the process, which was great news for us.

Using the knowledge and basic game design we have planned out so far, we were able to make a small prototype of the texting portion of the game using proto.io, a website useful for making prototypes of mobile apps, since it comes with all of the art assets Apple uses in the various interfaces of its apps. Our prototype presents a branching narrative that walks the player through one of the situation cards from the original board game, but instead of the situation being presented by one of the other players, it is revealed via the player character’s son, who is asking to stay with you, since his partner kicked him out for excessive drinking. The player then has to make a decision about how to respond to the situation directly to the character who would be most affected.

More situations like these are to come in future versions of the game, for which more documentation has been put together this week.

We also put together a broader picture of what our game will be by organizing the different apps we may include in the game. Here are our plans for each app:

• Texting will allow the player to carry out informal conversations with their character’s friends and family. These interactions will have the same format as the prototype we currently have, re-purposing the situation cards from the original board game.
• Email will work similarly to texting, but for more formal conversations with people like employers and landlords.
• Banking will help players keep track of their money, simulating their place on the poverty spiral.
• Health will give players a window into their character’s mental health, as well as information about information like current address (if any), emergency contacts, state of family members, health insurance, etc.
• News will replace social action cards, showing real-world events and policies that will affect how the characters live their lives.

The following apps are potential apps that may not make it into the final game, but we find have merit.

• To-Do List will list out mundane activities of the player character’s day.
• Calendar will list important events or appointments for the player character.
• GoFundMe will give a window into the player character’s relationship, since the amount of donations friends and family will make are reflective of how invested they are in that character.
• YouTube will show videos from interviews we’ve conducted with real people who have experienced poverty firsthand.
• Phone/Voicemail will let the player see different messages that other characters have left theirs.
• Music will show what kinds of music the player character listens to. This one will be more difficult due to copyright, but talks of creating original songs have been happening.

We’ve also been revamping the project website, logo, and poster, making sure that they reflects what our mission with the game as well as possible.

Next week is quarters for us, where we will present the current state of the project to faculty for review. We hope they will think that this game is going in the direction that will be the greatest benefit to those experiencing poverty as possible.