How could one week of an ETC project be both one of the least development intensive AND one of the most high stakes? It’s halves week, of course! Let’s get into how that went for Team Fortitude.
We started this week with the “World’s Crappiest Slide Deck,” as per our advisers’ advice (every slide was just a title and an empty void), and worked this week to encapsulate eight weeks of work into 15 minutes of power point presentations. We summarized our design, tech, and art work, as well as going over our plans for the future. In addition to preparing our presentation, we prepared a few bonus slides that we would refer to that didn’t encapsulate the most important parts of our project, but might come up in the questions period. Our final presentation can be found here.
Overall, our presentation went quite smoothly. We presented with poise and thorough knowledge of the topics, and knew the answers to all the questions that were asked of us. We even got to use one of our bonus slides to answer a question.
Once the presentation was over, the team took time to wind down, reflect, and plan our next steps. The design team focused on finding a way to portray GoFundMe in a way that makes it more clear that it’s meant to be an indicator of relationships. The team’s leading idea is to invent a new in-game app to replace GoFundMe, called Team. Team is a social networking/crowdfunding app made to give users direct access to their support network of the people in their lives they trust the most. A user’s team is a small group of people containing everyone the user is willing to turn to in their darkest hours. They post on Team when they’re having problems too personal for the likes of Facebook or other social media where any post could be seen by any random acquaintance. The frequency of posts on Team is restricted to make sure the impact of any given user posting on Team is strong. Once a user posts on Team, everyone on their team can see it and offer help and support, be that monetary, emotional, or otherwise. Within Broke, players have the option to post on Team at the very end of the game, asking for help from their team to reach stability. Throughout the game, other characters will join and leave the player’s team in the same way that they’d donate to or retract donations from the player’s GoFundMe. The difference is essentially that the player’s team doesn’t have a dollar amount next to it, since the amount of money the team will produce will not be revealed until the very end of the game, since that’s the only time that the player can ask them for help. We help this will serve both as a social indicator and a demonstration of the strength of cooperation among people in poverty that often exists in real life. Team Fortitude is in favor of this idea, but it still needs to be pitched to our advisers and client.
Going into the second and final half of our project, we know there’s a lot of work and difficult decisions ahead of us (just like there will be for the players of Broke), but we’re ready to take it on and see what the future holds.