Newsletter 5 – Quarters

Week 5 (Sept. 22nd ~ 26th )

Quarters week! As the week started, we all knew that our main sprint goal was the quarters presentation that was going to happen at the end of the week on friday. We made a few attempt at paper play testing the skills page throughout the week, but stopped when we realized that we were not receiving or answering the questions we had. As usual Cewon was blazing through with her art and modeled, rigged, and textured her first model.

On Tuesday we had guests from Hasbro stop by our room and we had an opportunity to share with them our project and goals. Receiving a warm reaction to our visual direction and interested goal definitely gave us a confidence boost for the coming presentation.

Last week, we had a design scramble session and created a “Decision Map” where we created a path with Decision Questions in order of importance, starting at “Who is our Audience?” Answering these questions will make our goal more clear, and also shift the tasks on our team members as well. As we schedule out the rest of the semester, we hope to answer all of the Decision Questions early.

While preparing for the Quarters Presentation, we wanted to tackle the question of: “What story do we want to tell the faculty?” and “How can we translate our goals in a simple and quick way?” After we shared our vision and challenge to our advisor, we were able to realize that we are creating a bridge for Novice players to become Beginners through a faster and more fun experience.

On the scheduling side we have finished prototyping and making sure our art and sound could be represented and supported through our tech. The server was set up completing our final stretch of pre-production phase.

Website:
Our website is up!!
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/star-stone/

Starting next week:
We will enter our production phase! We are really excited to see all of the work Cewon and Tim has been working on to be represented in our platform. Our next big milestone will be 4 weeks from now at Halves presentation, and we plan to have a fleshed out prototype by then.