Week 5

This week was Quarters.  We discussed the background and motivation of the project, our design goals, and showed them a demo of a prototype we’d worked on.  The prototype was based heavily on the “Clean the City” idea we discussed with our client, but we’d added a level mechanic based around the idea of traveling through a pop-up book style city.

Generally, the reactions were positive, if a bit curious.  People liked the scratching mechanic, but highlighted the important of having a “juicy” core mechanic.  They also suggested we think about how people would be playing our game, and how we’d get them to pay money for it.  However, the most frequent comment we received was people essentially saying “This doesn’t feel like the lottery.”

We’d actually had that concern ourselves, that if we made our project too much of a “game”, people wouldn’t recognize it as a lottery.  Our clients had assured us that it was fine, that they weren’t looking to make a traditional lottery, but receiving all these questions had us doubting ourselves.  Fortunately, we had a meeting with our clients later that week, so we put together a demo we thought was more “lottery-like” to present to them.

While they liked the new idea, they said they actually preferred the previous one.  They assured us  that they were in fact more interested in making a fun games for change type game than they were in making a lottery.  This led us into another topic we’d received a lot of questions on, namely what our goals were for the semester.  Since we were making a lottery + games for change + actual fun game, it was hard to know which of those were most important, and how we’d know whether our project was a success at the end of the semester.  While it’s hard to put into an exact ranking, the impression seemed to be fun game > game for change > lottery.

This was definitely helpful pushing us in the right direction, but at the same time we didn’t feel like we had any idea that was fun enough to move forward with.  After a lot of discussion back and forth, discussing new ideas as well as revisiting old ones, we decided the only way we could know anything for sure was to actually try these ideas out and see which was the most fun.  We’re still sticking with the theme of environmentalism and pollution, but now we have 3 new game ideas that we’re going to prototype over the next week so we can have a solid gameplan for the rest of the semester.