Year: 2018

[caption id="attachment_207" align="alignnone" width="640"] Dam buildin'[/caption] "All good things must come to an end," said someone who must not have liked good things very much. Alas, faithful reader(s), we've reached the end of Project Prism, but there is good news—as we showed off the game to the many visitors we received in our project room this week for the first annual ETC Spring Open House, we realized that we made something truly special. This game has the ability to make a real difference in the lives of the people who play it, and we've been gratified to see the enthusiasm it's generated thus far, and we can't wait to see what happens when it's out in the world in just a short little while. We squashed the remaining bugs, continued…

[caption id="attachment_187" align="alignnone" width="800"] Openin'[/caption] This week was was part retrospective and part race towards the finish line. On Monday and Tuesday, we hosted members of the ETC faculty in our project room for "soft opening," which was our last chance to receive feedback before our upcoming final presentation. In addition to the now near-complete game experience, we were also able to show video footage from the post-game classroom discussion we captured last week. The faculty was able to witness the outline of transformational effects that the game is having, and we came out of the two days feeling confident in our design decisions and the work we've produced thus far. As of this writing, the game is technically complete in that it's playable from start to finish and can…

[caption id="attachment_147" align="alignnone" width="660"] Discussin'[/caption] The Prism train is hurtling towards the station and shows no sign of slowing down. While in real life this would result in a catastrophe of epic proportions for all involved, in the comfortable, imaginary space of this metaphor, it means we've got our collective nose to the grindstone and we're getting things done. Lots of things, actually. Above, you can see a brief preview of the classroom discussion that accompanies the game. We had a chance this week to watch and observe Mrs. Mills, the principal at Beech Bottom Primary, leading the school's 4th graders through a near-final version of this discussion. What we found will shock you. Nah, just kidding, it's all working pretty great. The kids are enthralled enough with the game…

[caption id="attachment_140" align="alignnone" width="660"] Rockin'[/caption] This week was a full-fledged assault on finishing the game. Although it's not quite done yet, all 3 major animal scenarios are now present and accounted for within the game. "The other side of the river" used to be an empty place not worth spending much time in, but as of today, you can meet such exciting creatures as the wild boar and the rabbit. It's nice to see the forest increasingly more populated. Deforestation might be a major issue the world faces in real life, but here in our fictional temperate paradise, it's only getting more lush. [caption id="attachment_142" align="alignnone" width="954"] He's not dead, we promise. He's just hurt and he needs your help![/caption] That's actually not entirely true. One of the issues we've…

[caption id="attachment_132" align="alignnone" width="660"] Breaking from tradition, there isn't a clever caption here—it's just a moose at a museum...a MOOSE-eum?? We're hoping to put a moose in our game. Somebody take the blog controls away from me, please. [/caption] Alas, week 11, you're gone already and we hardly knew ye.  With only a few weeks left in the semester, the team has been buckling down to incorporate the feedback we received from last week's presentations and playtesting, as well as to finish implementing the remaining animal scenarios in the story. First, we completely overhauled the game map. There is a more cohesive design to the forest now that will be much easier to navigate. The river is now both central to the story and to the forest itself; it literally bisects the…

[caption id="attachment_128" align="alignnone" width="660"] Yidi-in'[/caption] This week Team Prism presented our progress at the halfway point to the ETC faculty and fellow students. After weeks of working away in relative privacy, it was super exciting to share our work and vision with the community at large. Above, programmer Yidi Zhu is talking about our dialogue system and how it advances our forest-crisis narrative. The team discussed everything we'd done up to this point, including an overview, research on autism and autism awareness efforts, our design process, the prototypes we've been working on, the technical challenges of creating a 3D game that's capable of being played on relatively-weak PCs, audio philosophies and difficulties, playtesting, and more. We had to cover a lot of ground in 15 minutes, and it took a…

[caption id="attachment_120" align="alignnone" width="660"] Road Showin'[/caption] While 3/5 of our team was out west at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the other 2/5 took our progress thus far and brought it to the people—namely, the children who will actually be playing this game when it's all done. Pictured above is the 4th grade class at Beech Bottom Primary, who played through the partial fruit of our labor for the first time.  The initial reactions were generally positive; our earlier focus group sessions paid off as the children responded favorably to the art-style and forest setting. They loved the sounds of the forest and liked the peaceful music, and mostly understood the concept of the fox "letting off steam" during periods of intense sensory overload. There is some…

[caption id="attachment_116" align="alignnone" width="660"] Designin'[/caption] We're in the thick of it now. With the core of our design complete, we've begun to turn our focus towards major production of our game. When last we spoke, dear readers, the team was hopeful that by this week we'd develop the in-game scenarios that would form the backbone of our forest-in-crisis story. Indeed, we've identified and outlined the major story beats that our fox protagonist will go through as it wrangles the animals together to build the dam of dams: The Fox will encounter a bear during the daytime. The bear will be hungry and uncooperative until you help it satisfy its cravings. As a nocturnal animal, the fox will be uncomfortable with the bright sunlight and chipper chirping of diurnal birds and…

[caption id="attachment_112" align="alignnone" width="660"] Workin' (hard)[/caption] It wasn't a very glamorous week here at the Prism office, but it was a productive one. With an established design and a prototype that by all indications was on the right track, the team forged ahead and continued to refine and iterate, building on what was already working and starting to layer in some complexity. Story continues to be a focus. With the forest facing an impending crisis due to climate change (what hot-button issue WON'T we touch?), the wise owl and the majestic wolf reach out to the earnest fox about inspiring all the forest animals to come together and build a dam. (Where are the beavers, you ask? We are asking the same questions.) The catch is, of course, that the…

[caption id="attachment_104" align="alignnone" width="660"] Playtestin' Again(')[/caption] What a week! Last week's 1/4 presentation was followed by this week's 1/4 sit-downs, in which two members of the ETC faculty swung by our room (now very nicely decorated; pictures coming soon) to give us some more in-depth critiques and answer any questions that we may have as we forge ahead and take our early designs and prototypes and start actually making a game out of all of this stuff! It was also a moment for the team to reflect on the work we've done so far, how well we're working together as a team, improvements that can be made in the overall process of working on this project, etc. (Editor's note: I've become strangely hesitant to use the abbreviated form of et…