A new project, a new approach, a new outcome (?)

The first couple weeks have come and gone, and my new group has been hammering away. First off, my new teammates are:

• Sherly Yunita
• Cody Hansen
• Saurabh Pendse

The game idea pitched to us was that of a game to help autistic youths learn conversation patterns and social queues. A few ideas were tossed around, but we initially decided on a conversation game, such as Phoenix Wright or the conversation portions of Mass Effect. However, after some thought and deliberation, we brainstormed some more and came up with a rudimentary AI that the player would "program" through answering and correcting the AI's answers. Here is the initial pitch (this time with slideshare and not a YouTube video):

So why is this project different? Well, to start we used a physical prototype very early to figure out some of the more basic design issues. I cannot stress enough how helpful this process was. The group sat down in front of a white board, drew the game UI and we all walked through different game scenarios we were expecting to perform in the digital prototype. We did this during our second class as a group, and it helped to suss out so many issues we would have encountered very early into the digital prototype. Since we did this, we could get to the issue of "fun" in the prototype more quickly and more easily. Afterwards, we made up a scrum document (in google docs/drive again), and that can be seen here (click on the picture to check out the scrum doc):

The scrum didn't change a whole lot from the last group, but we did decide on a few things. First, we added a priority to each task. We also made tasks that were a little larger, so all of those one hour tasks that actually took 20 minutes would be weeded out. The biggest change was to make sprints for just two weeks, and to not actually create the second sprint until the first was over. This was mostly due to the plan of having and playing the digital prototype after our first week.

The entire idea of this new approach was to actually prototype multiple times and adjust the game until we hit on something that was fun. Most of us in this projects class, myself and my teams included, didn't actually get to prototype. We made cool, vertical slices of games that looked pretty and sold well to a potential client. And that was a good experience. But to be honest with myself, I love designing and I want to prototype. And I think a lot of other students have the same feeling. This time we're doing it differently. We made the plan to have a digital prototype done by the third Monday in the cycle, and we got it done. More on that playtest (and if it worked) next time.