This week, Team Fortitude continued its development of BROKE, and saw a change in the development process as the team began to focus less on the continuum of development and more on finalizing the end product of the app. This was mainly due to the fact that we had to produce an alpha version of the game for our client to take to a conference.
The alpha version combined all the work we’ve done so far; it included a notification on the home screen that encouraged players to go to the text app, where they’d play through a conversation, the outcome of which would notify them that their bank balance changed. The player could then see a graph showing how their bank balance changed within the bank app.
In order to produce this, the tech team had some work to do; they finished the bank app (complete with graph that automatically scales on the y-axis!), worked on changing the text app so that conversations with multiple contacts can be accessed, and adjusted the database to improve the recording and retrieval of information. These new developments have come together to create our smoothly working alpha version. We plan to have a beta version done by the end of Week 13, just in time for our soft opening. The beta will be fully playable from start to end for one character.
The design team has also been hard at work finalizing the clusters for the purple character so as to tell their story. More conversations have also been written for them. The design team has also conducted three interviews with Ange, Kayleah, and Alexander, three people who experience poverty on a daily basis. The design team learned a lot about poverty, and are now more informed about what poverty is really like. The three interviewees also all agreed to be part of the in-game documentary, so the design team got a couple hours of potential footage for that. More interviews are to come in future weeks.
The art team has been finalizing the logo for the game, working alongside our client to get the best possible result. More work has also been done on the design of the cover of the box of the board game.
The game is coming together, and now that the soft opening of our project is in sight, Team Fortitude is continuing to develop BROKE’s final features and tie all the content we’ve created into one transformational package.