This week was the soft opening of Team Fortitude’s game BROKE. We are in the home stretch of the development of this game, and it is vital that BROKE is as close to finished as possible. We had a lot of faculty look at our game this week, and their expectations were exceedingly high. Let’s see how Team Fortitude fared in this penultimate week.
The last time a large group of faculty saw BROKE was at halves, and back then, many faculty members were confused by what the final product of the game was, and thought the text app would be the entire game, which is far from the truth, now that we have email, banking, news, and CircleUp in the game, which led to a lot of faculty being pleasantly surprised by our near-final product’s levels of depth and complexity. The main feedback was in reference to UI usability, but the vast majority of what was said referenced fixes we already planned on making. There were also some minor tweaks with the writing that were suggested, which were fixed immediately. Considering how minor the suggestions of the faculty largely were, we feel like we’re in a very good place now moving into the final product.
The tech team mostly worked on various minor fixes this week, but also implemented some small features. Those include audio integration, the client tool to add new content to the game, and notifications from CircleUp. The tech team also split up a bit, due to the low amount of work now compared to during the rest of the project, so members of the tech team also worked on documentation, IRB (Institutional Research Board) certification, and the parsing the final interview in order to finish the documentary.
The design team did some fixes in the balancing of the game, namely because it was impossible to win as the homeless character, which is only slightly more bleak than in real life, so that was fixed. They also did quality assurance to find any bugs in the narrative tree that might have been missed. They also worked on changing the way monetary success in the bank app is displayed from a numerical representation (which would be extremely difficult to display with accuracy, given the many factors that go into expenditures that we don’t have time to deal with) into a visual representation. Also, the post-game discussion questions from the original board game were altered to fit the single-player nature of the digital version. Finally, the design team rebranded itself as the design/sound team, and produced the sound effects for the various notifications in the game.
The art team worked on the visual representation in the bank app, as per request of the design team. They also worked on the redesign of the board game art, the endgame summary, and the interface of the settings app.
We’re just about to start the final week of the development of BROKE. It’s now or never for us to deliver a final, quality, shippable game, but given that we don’t have any major redesigns or fixes to make in the game, we’re confident that we’re well on our way to sending something that can truly increase empathy for those living in the condition of poverty out into the world. We wish the team the best of luck. See you next week for the last ever Team Fortitude blog post!
