Project Two, Weeks 1 and 2 get!

Weeks one and two went by pretty quickly for our next project. So, getting down to business, our team is:

• Myself - producer
• Alice Owens - artist
• Jason Thummel - engineer
• Jason Kanagaratnam - engineer

We are part of the 3 groups that were chosen to work on the educational games (as opposed to the TreadPort physical therapy games). Oddly enough, we actually chose a physical therapy game to work on! Stacy Bamberg is a professor on campus working in the bioengineering department on a few projects involving physical therapy for stroke victims. Out of the two presented projects, my team and I decided on the Kinect game for arm range of movement therapy. Initially, we were going back and forth from this to the thermodynamics game presented by another professor, but we eventually decided on this due to the excitement of working with Kinect.

Quite honestly, I pushed fairly hard for the Kinect game as I recently had a close family member suffer through a stroke and the rehabilitation required afterwards. I just thought how great it would be do to something to help people through that process. Seeing it first hand really showed how difficult it is to stay motivated and to keep watch on the patient's progress. Progress is slow, and having a visual way to display to the patient/player the improvement he/she is making and an engaging method of encouraging therapy could be so important to the well-being of the patient. To be a little selfish, the family member who suffered a stroke has done so much for me growing up that I couldn't help but jump at the chance to give back to him in a meaningful way. On the other hand, I thought it would be interesting, and motivating, to be personally invested in a project like this.

The team went through myriad design ideas before we came to our current gardening concept. Since a somewhat simple game had already been developed for this, we at first thought of ways to basically skin the same concept with things like bingo, mazes, or word-finds. That just seemed too simple and too boring still. That's when we came up with the idea of some sort of consistent narrative arc, albeit simple, tying the separate levels together. For me, gardening immediately sprang to mind. There are many stages of gardening, from tilling the soil to harvesting your fruits, that we could design multiple stages easily. Combined with a sort of narrative (watching your garden grow) that keeps the player engaged from level to level, we hoped to engage the player with the outdoors aesthetic as well. Since most physical therapy is done indoors in sterile environments, we hope that this aesthetic allows the player to escape the sterile hallway if even just a little.

From there we hammered out some details, involving figuring out how to perform the actions with the Kinect, what levels to use, how to work in breaks, and how to bring players back to do more physical therapy. I made a short video of our initial pitch (unfortunately with no audio) that should give a basic understanding of our original concept.

From here we got to work immediately, scrumming out our project and deciding on what to prototype and what to leave out. Below is a thumbnail showing the basic layout of our task pane for our scrum. Click on the picture to actually check out the scrum, and be sure to check out the different tabs at the bottom!

As we moved past pre-production and entered into our first week of working on the game itself, things have been coming together quite nicely. The engineers have been working hard pair programming. At first I thought this would create some issues with scheduling tasks and estimating hours, but it has actually gone quite smoothly. They've been churning out excellent work, and since both of our engineers have been working together, there hasn't been any conflict regarding duplicate work or people waiting on prerequisite features to be completed. Our artist Alice has really embraced the scrum process and has been super productive. As for me, I've been scrambling to keep up with their work flow a bit, and trying to learn a little about audio so we can add sound effects and background music. This seems relatively simple to code in XNA, but my utter lack of sound design knowledge might hold me back a bit. I'm going to keep trying to get that done, and we may actually get to add some more features into our prototype given our rate of completion. Our estimates may have been too high. That's not a problem though (or should I say if you're going to have a problem, this is the best kind to have) as we'll just add some of the features we took out and use that time to polish the levels. Things are looking promising, and by next week we should have a mostly complete prototype.