Now that we’ve changed our target from six games based on psychological concepts to three transformational games that will help teens live them, we needed to take some time for more thorough research. We focused on Curiosity, Growth Mindset, and Empathy. We discovered during playtesting that one of our initial curiosity prototypes also had strong elements of growth mindset, so we think that our games will include more than those three topics. In particular, Aaron is finding through his research that empathy is strongly connected to kindness and cooperation.

In addition to researching our psychological constructs, we’ve also been researching methods for making transformational games. In particular, we’re using the Transformational Framework to ground and guide our design process. By using the Transformational Framework, we will focus our designs towards how our games should change players and what barriers are keeping them from changing on their own.

We’ve also adjusted our development cycle to work on the games sequentially as a full team rather than in parallel as individuals. This should help us put more resources into each game and prevent us from overloading Guangya, our artist.