Capstone Has Begun!
Well the first two weeks of my Senior year at Champlain College have come and gone, it's an amazing and terrifying experience. I have my capstone class on Monday so my team and I get to hit the ground running on the first day. We met up and pitched all the ideas we came up with over the summer and then did a practice I like to call "word vomit", where we think of random words that are floating in our heads and put them up on a whiteboard and see what sounds good together. We had a few more meetings, and a lot more "word vomit", but by the end of all that we had 30 ideas that we thought we'd like to talk about more. We then decided to each choose 5 ideas that we would like to try and prototype and eventually pursue developing. Out of those 30 ideas we decided on 8 that were solid enough to mention to our class, and out of those 8 we agreed on 4 that were ready to be made into prototypes. We went to class that following week and felt pretty confident, we pitched our ideas and got some pretty great feedback concerning our ideas. The main focus of our feedback was we had to focus on that minute-to-minute gameplay, and once we did that we'd be good to prototype our ideas. Immediately after that class we had a quick scrum meeting and decided to drop our more narrative heavy game, usually in capstone narrative heavy games tend to not make the cut. With 3 ideas we then focused on what minute-to-minute gameplay would look like in those ideas. After about 7 hours of iterating and a 3 hour team meeting, we all came to the conclusions of what these games would look like as soon as the player started up the game. We were finally ready to start prototyping. My programmer was already hard at work making our first idea into a prototype and has made some great progress on it. Meanwhile, our teams other designer and I have been making documentation of the two ideas that we are in charge of prototyping. Hopefully by the end of the weekend we'll have our prototypes somewhat finished and ready to be tested in our school's QA Lab so we can challenge our current stage. That's about it for now! Keep checking in for all of my capstone adventures!
- John Salagaj