Mentor Meeting and Breakdown of Ideas
3:30pm, 20 August 2018, GP PS1010
This week the group received feedback on their initial proposals from a diverse set of eyes. This proved to be helpful as it allowed us all to receive honest criticisms on our game ideas and also allowed us to receive insightful feedback on possible flaws our game may have that we unintentionally looked over during our short development stage.
Relating back to my initial proposal Peta was able to pick up on intricate details that I had overlooked or process that I accidentally omitted from my experience that ultimately would detract from the overall “gaminess” of my project.
From Peta’s (and the universities) experience with Kinect, they found that getting too close to other people resulted in a lot of clashing and most importantly, painful headbutts
This presents an issue given the demographic and proposed setting for my game as I ultimately don’t want to have young children clanging their heads together early in the school morning
It was suggested that when the game starts that the players be issued a warning, similar to many Kinect and motion-controlled consoles (Wii)
It was also suggested that I write up a risk assessment plan and create an infrastructure on steps players should take to avoid collisions and what to do if a collision is to occur
Gamifying the experience:
As it stands my game isn’t a true game-like experience. It lacks some sort of small and interesting story for the children to follow and the areas presented were generic and uninteresting
The experience needs to be GAMIFIED
The experience needs a journey
Possibly the children follow a pirate (or control a pirate) as he moves from Island to Island and them as teams must work to show who is more up to the challenge of being a pirate
Peta also suggested that the game have an interesting interactable map, so every game has a location and thus ultimately adds to the interest that the children may have in the product
Very simple map mock-up. The children select where they want to go. The boat goes there, and they complete the game associated with the area. They can also select their pirate name, to give the game a somewhat more personal feeling. Furthermore, each zone would house new characters would the children to become.
Working in with their timeframe and environment:
Peta also suggested, that if there was no choice that the games work in a certain order so that children would be readier for school when the games are completed (remembering this is made to be played before classes start at school)
The idea was that the students start with the Tug-Of-War game
This would allow them to burst out a large amount of energy quickly and hopefully calm them down for the next game
The next game would be the Simple Grammar game
This is due to its complexity in relation to the Numbers game
It would be nicer on their brains if the game started difficult then moved to easy before the day started
Finally, the Simple Addition game would start
This would hopefully be easier for the students to work with and get them ready for the day ahead
Object association and maths:
One last point Peta made was about the Simple Addition game. Her proposal is that there are two game modes. One with just numbers and one with amounts of things
As an example, one mode shows 2+2 =? and the other mode shows 2 apples + 2 apples =? apples
Another simple mock-up of the adding game but instead there are apples and not just numbers. This was suggested by Peta as an association of objects with numbers is something used by early years teaching. Such as counting on fingers etc.
