On the first day of this semester, we mainly talk about how we can work and communicate with efficiency under remote situation. Everyone shares his/her experience working remotely last semester, especially on what went well and what would have been improved. After discussion, we plan to have daily stand-up every morning to keep everyone on the same page, and also update work progress in slack channel and trello board.
During the first meeting with our faculty advisors, a lot of questions that we prepared get answered. For the first half of this semester, we will basically focus on research and prototyping parallelly. As a discovery project, we should pay attention to getting the answers we want initially – Why do people feel engaged when they are doing exercise or playing exercise games? What ideas could we use from game design to make exercise appealing to gamers? How do we increase the awareness of achievement as well as decrease the awareness of discomfort caused by physical activity? These are the key points that we should keep in mind during later phases.
Our first brainstorming starts right after the faculty meeting, so that we could begin rolling as soon as possible. After the two-hour time limit, we come up with various ideas – the type from racing game to rhythm game, and input device from bike petal to mobile phones. Meanwhile, we also look into possible hardware options based on the ideas we have. We create a slide to keep track of all the prototype thoughts as well as hardware solutions, and will ask for feedback from our instructors on next Monday.