Week 2

May 10th-16th
Our second week, we made some final adjustments to our lab space. We set-up some additional hardware, and arranged to have the desk space needed for group discussions and scheduled meetings. We also made some alteration to the website so it was more presentable, and organized so that is was more user friendly. We met with Professor Gooch at the beginning of the week to discuss our progress and a rough agenda for the summer. She had us work on a detailed time line and present it to her in the middle of the week to be approved.

We further investigated some different styles of Game Design Documents, and discovered a template that best suited our project. The bottom of our website now has a section devoted to the document, that we can fill in later on.

Continuing our background research, it was now focused more on the educational aspect of games. We discovered some game like Invar® & Steel Alloys, where the captivating aspects and educational information was well balanced. However, we found others that were strongly lacking one or the other. Games like the Periodic Table Game, gave us a good example of a typical educational game, where it was too boring to engage the user. These games proved to be a good resource, but were not inviting to a university student.

During the background research, we found that one of the important element of the entertaining game was the sound. This prompted us to downloaded some audio editing software to familiarize ourselves with it, so we can easily create some of our own sounds for our game.

Later in the week, we met with Professor Bruce Gooch, now a professor at the University of Victoria, and the author of the book Non-Photorealistic Rendering. He will be teaching a Game Design course in July for high school students, and offered us the chance to use his class to help us gather data. This was a great opportunity to test our game on a large group of students, very close in age of our target audience. We made arrangements and adjusted our time line so that we are able to test our sketch and the content of our game on the summer game students. This will provide us with immediate feedback on the entertaining aspect, as well as the educational aspect. After making the appropriate adjustments, we will then generate a rough playable and test it once more with the same group of students, to see if the key concepts are actually retained after the game has been played. Additional testing can only help us to improve our game. After discussing this, we started thinking about some pre-test and post-testing questions we could ask the students. We created a section on our website where we can add some questions we think might be helpful in determining the strengths and weaknesses of our game.