Fin Rovers - Week 1 -3
Hi, this is the first bog post for me, Fin Rovers ;v. I'm a designer during IMT&S with a primary focus towards game design. This blog post is the first of many where I'll recount the tasks I've done during the IMT&S weekly sprints.
Important to note is that I'm one of the flexible workers within IMT&S, which means that I'm actively working on two projects at once. This means that I have to talk about multiple tasks within different projects, which can make the post excessively bloated. To make sure this won't be the case, I might skip over the minute details.
Beeyou games During the first two sprints (sprint 0 and 1) I have been rather busy. As we are at the start and have to concept and ideate on an idea a lot, I had to do much thinking about solutions that the team could work with. The first sprint (0) was dedicated to a lot of brainstorming and thinking of ideas. After we got a solid idea on the preferences of our target audience, I could start on thinking of making the idea fun and engaging by thinking of gameplay.
By sprint 1 (week 2-3), the whole team was already busy with a lot of concepting. I was busy as well trying to get a first draft out for the game design which would give the team a general idea on how the game is going to be played, and so that everyone has something more to chew on for the next weeks while I would be busy with writing the game design document. I presented this to the team and asked for feedback afterwards.
Here are some of the very "special" sketches I made for the game design:
At this point, I was very eager to move with the team members of BeeYou, but we gained a rude awakening after it was made clear how massive of a jump we made by completely overlooking the research we had to do. So as I was ready to start writing the design document, we first had to start with conducting our research. Oof.
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Storytelling with data While being the project manager and game designer for BeeYou, I am also the game & narrative designer for the storytelling with data project. This project did not lift off immediately in sprint 0 as me and the team members first had to conversate with the clients to get a better understanding of what they wanted. Because this took a little while, we were not able to do anything else besides some research about the market analysis.
My research in the end was sadly discarded as the client made clear that such an analysis would be superfluous to them :].
We got more chances to talk to the clients during sprint 1, which helped us progress a lot more and allowed the team to start concepting as well. Actually, Sprint 1 mainly consisted of discussions and brainstorms, as we were very much trying to figure out the wishes of the client while also doing a lot of research on our target audience. Without, we were really unable and uncertain on where to even start.
During a meeting with the client, we did a collective brainstorm together where everyone threw their ideas on post-it notes. Everyone afterwards voted on the ideas they liked the most. The ideas that came out of this would be used as a foundation during a brainstorm of our own.
These are the results from the brainstorm with our clients
We did our own brainstorm closely afterwards while using the results from the client meeting as a foundation to build upon, the results can be seen here.
It's not too readable, but it is split up in different categories:
What we know
What we want to know
insights
With all our gathered information, we butted heads one more time to consider a first concept that we were able to develop more. Underneath can the summary of our first idea be found which we will develop overtime into a working prototype that can be presented to both the clients and our users.