We had walk-arounds with ETC faculty members today. It was a hard concept to explain for people who didn’t have similar game experience before. However, we still gained some valuable advice after effective communication. Mainly from two aspects, theming/motivation and gaming/feedbacks.
Another important action we planned to take after walk-around is taking survey on our target guests: Eyewire expert users.
We finished our branding design and critique this week.
We’ve also decided our core game concept to be “team competition on neuron territories” for advanced players. Upon that, we further dived into game system design details.
We decide to start creating our first prototype (2nd sprint section) next week, in which we will build a new web page that shows player territory overview.
This week we made some progress on game mechanism design. After talking with our clients and faculty last week, we want “persistence” to be a core key world for our brainstorm. We developed two sets of pipeline from data and user perspectives. We identified some problems that players will face on their experience journey, and put them into priority hierarchy. Then thought of around 10 solutions for each problem.
On Wednesday and Thursday we presented our ideas to the clients, they’re happy with what we’ve got so far, and the next step is to further build frameworks for the game systems and make prototypes.
During the second week of production, we focus on understanding the scientific concepts of neuron science by having a demo meeting with our clients and reading academic papers. Meanwhile we brainstormed on developing game mechanisms that could incorporate with physical facts of brain, functional purpose of crowd-sourcing and entertaining aspect of fun.
On the other hand, with the help of our faculty Jess and Ricardo, we aim to create pipelines for data and users, as well as market analysis of the demographics from the previous game Eyewire.
Production wise, we planed to start our first “sprint” section next week and have some prototypes generated for clients.
During the first week of production, we met with our clients and faculty, clarifying project goals and settling down our equipment.
