Month: May 2019

In this final, epilogue of a week, Team Fortitude gave their final presentation for BROKE, handed off all the project’s materials to the client, and led BROKE into the vast unknown we mortals call the Google Play Store. Let’s take a look at how the team got there.

The first part of the week was primarily spent in preparing for our final presentation on Wednesday, the slides for which can be viewed here. The presentation covered the reception of the finished product, descriptions of how our metrics of accessibility, empathy, and education were showcased in the design, writing, art, tech, the client tools, and the add-ons, and the lessons we learned from our project. Though we haven’t heard back from the faculty about official feedback from our presentation, we’ve heard good things overall from the grape vine.

We finished the project this week, which mostly involved smaller tweaks and bug fixes. Specifically, the art team finished the box art and UI/icon adjustments, the tech team finished up the client tool and technical documentation, and the design team finished the documentary and project archives. Once all of that was done, we handed everything off to our client, who will now be in charge of distributing the game and adding all add-ons to brokethegame.com. While she was here, we worked for several hours to upload BROKE to the Google Play Store. It was a long and frustrating process that ended in plenty of screaming and victory dances as BROKE became available for the world to download and experience. However, BROKE was removed from the Google Play store days later due to Violation of Usage of Android Advertising ID policy and section 4.8 of the Developer Distribution Agreement. We found this ridiculous, but we have a good lead on how to fix it and get reinstated, since this seems to be a known issue with Unity games.

Other than helping our client distribute BROKE on the App Store and Google Play Store (and keep it there!), that’s it. The six members of Team Fortitude reunited for the last time in a movie theater to watch Detective Pikachu together, and then we parted ways. We’re all very happy with how the project turned out, and feel like we did some good in the world by helping this game with such an important message become a reality. We’d like to thank you, the readers, and everyone who has supported us and helped BROKE become a reality and make it the best game it can be. Keep an eye on the App Store and Google Play stores for when the game is released, and give it a go. And remember to show compassion for the less financially well-off. Your empathy makes a difference. So, without further ado, this is Team Fortitude, the developers of BROKE: The Game, signing off.

This week saw many parts of the project wrap up into a completed state, just in time for the ETC Open House we saw on Friday, during which old and new faces came to play BROKE and share their thoughts and what they learned. Let’s take a look at how we got there.

The tech team finished the client tool, allowing Dana Gold to easily input the content for the final three characters (single parent, elder, and illegal immigrant) without having to learn a single iota of programming knowledge. She came in this week to try out the tool, and found it very intuitive and easy to work with, which was a great relief for Team Fortitude.

The tech team is also working on our narrative data processing compiler, which helps transform the text-based content into a fully-functioning interactive narrative, the settings app, representing the bank amounts as a piggy bank instead of a numerical value, and the technical documentation. They also managed to fix all remaining UI bugs, which means that now all the features the team wanted are in the game and fully functional!

The art team helped the tech team with all the UI bugs, the box cover, profile icons for the three remaining characters, and changed the previous flood image to include a concerned cow standing on the roof of the car.

The design team worked mostly on documentation of the project, slides for Wednesday’s final presentation, and archive materials. At this point, adding more design would be detrimental to the project, since it has to be done on Friday morning, so that’s most of what the design team will be doing for the rest of the semester.

The documentary team was able to make a rough cut of the documentary. Unfortunately, that rough cut is 29 minutes long, when it’s only supposed to be 15 minutes long, so more cutting and refinement will be necessary in the upcoming week.

The week ended with the annual ETC Open House, which allowed many guests and other students to come to our project room and try out BROKE. Overall, the response was very positive, and while some bugs were discovered, they were fixed by the time the Open House was over. We also put up a poster saying “Something I Learned About Poverty Is…” and encouraged guests to put a sticky note on the poster to answer the question. Here’s what they said:

“I didn’t know homeless shelters have requirements for money goals and timeliness”

“It’s really hard to get out of.”

“No sympathy.” (referring to how nobody has sympathy for those in poverty)

“A lot more people are in danger of being homeless or running out of food than I expected.”

“It helps me live through the situation :)”

“You have to choose between bad choices without knowing what longer term repercussions might be.”

“Your dignity’s worth nothing when you are in poverty.”

“People are not lazy, it’s circumstances which are difficult.” (another guest wrote “ditto” on this one)

“To balance money and your belief (e.g. justice, kindness…) is hard. There are man though choices, but it’s still important to stick to some belief. Even if you really need money.”

“It needs to be discussed.”

“It’s challenging to make minute to minute decisions.”

Overall, it is very encouraging for us to see that overall, people who play BROKE are gaining more empathy for people living with the condition of poverty. That is our overarching transformational goal, after all, so it looks like our game truly is a success! And speaking of transformational games, Sabrina Culyba, author of the Transformational Framework, which we referred to very often in the first month of the project, came to the ETC Open House to play BROKE. She had some small notes of improvement for us, but said that we were doing a good job overall, which was a very good sign for us.

BROKE is seriously wrapping up in this final week of development. Aside from a few minor bug fixes, refinement of the documentary, and our final presentation on Wednesday, BROKE is completely done. Considering the repeating, positive response we’ve had from playtesters and our client alike, it seems like we can definitely call this project a success. See you next week for the very last blog post by Team Fortitude.