CAGD 370 Blog Post 1

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be going over the process I have gone through so far in an attempt to create a digital prototype of a video game that stemmed from an idea. At first we were all tasked with coming up with multiple ideas that we could potentially pitch to a client that would be interested in developing a game project. After the pitching stage, it came down to deciding which idea we would like to pursue and ultimately see all the way through the development process. I quickly formed a group with my group mates Hannah and Yasmine and we immediately got to work. 

Kickoff
Once our group was formed, we all decided who would take on what role for our group and what skills everyone would provide to the group. Since we decided to work on Hannah’s pitch idea she stuck with the Lead Designer Role, Yasmine agreed to be our Team Producer and I was able to secure the Programmer role for our team. Afterwards we set our priorities for the project and the prototype in scope and we were able to quickly set up a backlog that would help us document all of our Needs, Wants and Wishes we would have for this project. Generally when we were creating these objectives for our project we definitely kept in mind what our players would want from our video game and decided to create these objectives based on user stories. We also made sure we would create enough of these by breaking them down as specific as we could to the point that it would provide and also cover a good amount of workload for our team's mission. At this point we as a team felt like we had established some good ground work to be able to start our first Sprint Kickoff. 

Challenges Faced
During Sprint Kickoff every person in our group got assigned 2 weeks worth of work. Our first goal however, was for our team to effectively create a paper prototype of our digital design. It was at this stage that we began to face some challenges in our project. We began to think about how we could creatively design a paper prototype that would perfectly envision what our digital prototype should look like. We began brainstorming some unique ideas and ultimately we stuck with the design down below. We figured that we could focus a little more on our game's main mechanic which is for the player to be able to teleport between spots on the map. So ultimately we decided to stick with this design along with our rulesheet we created in order to be able to playtest with people and hopefully receive some useful feedback. 

Playtest Results
During our Playtests, we were able to discover a few areas of our paper prototype that succeeded and a few that perhaps could use some more revisiting or improvement. One thing that playtesters really understood from our rulesheet was the whole movement of our player which was also our main game mechanic, so overall we felt that we explained that section and implemented it really well into our paper prototype. As for some stuff that we noticed went wrong were perhaps the implementation of sub character to our players role. For our game we decided that the player should protect another sub character at all times in order to stay alive in the game.This resulted in some confusion from our playtesters that ultimately created some frustration as well. Another thing we could have done differently was to shorten some areas of our rulesheet that also created some frustration in getting the game started. Overall this is some stuff we need to work on going forward in our digital design for our prototype and it definitely helped receiving this feedback right now during our paper prototype.