Summary

This week, the team continued developing the core mechanics of the game. Like last week, we’re still struggling with balancing the concepts the client wants to teach and what we think makes a game appealing to those in our target demographic. To help solve this problem, this week, we gathered information from our target demographic and from an expert in educational games. We hope to use this information to make any changes needed to our core mechanics in the coming week.

Programming

Programmers finalized the game’s main cycle, which now includes a day and night portion as well as lunchtime. Taking into account the feedback from different experts, we determined this would be the best way to make time pass in the game. Tasks will be assigned to employees now rather than the player. Programmers also made more progress on the store interior scene, although it is still mostly programmer art. Tapping on on the door marked “Delivery” now triggers a pop-up panel that details an ingredients list that is programmatically generated. We are working to have a similar mechanic for the store employees. Much of the programming work will be dealing with UI in Unity, as programmers decided that loading a new scene for each menu will be too time consuming. Below is how we envision the game cycle to function:

How we expect the game cycle to play out in a given day

Art

This week, artists continued working on the in store assets and started on employee assets. One of the main struggles that the artists have had this week is getting all the assets needed for the game in the small space that we have. Since the game is being developed for a mobile platform, there is already a limited amount of space for the player to interact with. Specifically, we’re trying to incorporate the sitting area and cooking area on the same screen, but the limited amount of space available is making it seem a bit cluttered. In order to get around this problem, artists have considered creating a scroll screen, but are hoping to keep the player on one screen. Artists have also worked on the menu and map assets for the player to do different tasks on.  

PlaytestinG

Along with last week’s paper playtesting, this week, the team was able to go to an event at the Carnegie Science Center. There, we were able to distribute a survey for students in our target demographic about the way they approach video games and what they thought about our ideas thus far. While we did not get as many people to fill out the survey as we had wanted, there was enough information to obtain an answer to some questions we had about the appearance of the game.

The survey was organized into three sections. In the first, players were asked some demographic questions, including their age and what kind of movies and books they consume. We wanted to make sure that we were getting responses from a wide range of people. In the second section of the survey, we asked more specifically for the respondent’s video game preferences for the same reason. The third section of the survey dealt specifically with BizWorks and some of the concerns we had discussing the game with our client. We wanted to make sure that the art assets and existing UI we had made sense. We also wanted to address the question of whether we should make a more realistic game or a more fantasy game, so we presented responders with more fantastical themes, like steampunk and magic fantasy and asked them if they preferred those themes over the realistic concept art that we have. Lastly, we wanted to know what aspects of a game make it fun for the players.

With all our respondents coming from an engineering fair, we had anticipated the data being extremely skewed, but there was a wide range of interests within the respondents. In general, most of the respondents were interested in action/adventure media, including video games. Half of the respondents reported playing games for over ten hours a week, while half played significantly less. Regarding our questions, we found that most of the respondents would be interested in a fantasy or steampunk style game, but didn’t necessarily prefer it over the existing style we have been using. Therefore, we decided to keep continuing with the art style that we have been using. While we got valuable information from the playtesting, we only got six respondents, so ideally, we’ll get more information in the future from the target demographic when we have a working prototype.

Research

This week, we were also able to speak to Erik Harpstead, a professor at CMU that specializes in educational games. We explained the mechanics of our game, as well as some of our concerns and how we planned to implement the different financial literacy concepts that we wanted to teach. His feedback came in the form of a few large points. He suggested that we take everything we wanted to implement and only include about half of them, with his reasoning being that we should try to make the game as simple as possible so that the players could process it more easily. He also suggested that we don’t have a hard end goal for the game and instead allow the player to choose when to restart the game. After speaking with him, the team decided to change a few aspects of our game. First, players will have the option to sell their business after a set amount of time, but will not need to. Instead, they can keep playing the game. However, no new interactions will be introduced, so ideally, the players will eventually want to restart the game on their own. Second, we changed the structure of the day so that it has a morning and evening shift, with a break in the middle of the day for employee interaction. Lastly, we’ll be trying to make all the calculations involved in the game to be as simple as possible, to make the game not overwhelming for the player.