Nothing can go smoothly and apparently now is the time for our problems to occur. Yesterday we had a meeting with a specialist on game mechanics and we hoped that he will give us some advices on how to develop our ideas. However, the reality didn’t meet our expectations. Since the beginning of the project we were really enthusiastic about everything and tried to do our best, but it seems like we overestimated our possibilities. The verdict was that we cannot handle this project within the given time and also with the budget that we are provided with. The project became too big and in order to finish it on time and in a proper way we have to make it more simple. It could be done in two ways – we either change the whole concept or leave only one game instead of three.
We have done a lot already to work out the existing concept so we decided to stick to it but leave only one game. The only thing we have to change in this case is the story (to fulfill the games that we are going to leave out).
We are also currently looking for people who can help us in programming and animating. Today we had couple of interviews with programmers and luckily we found the person that matches our requirements. We are looking forward to meeting him in our team and we believe that he will help us to bring our project to life.
Today we had another meeting with our assigners. Since the last meeting we have made our concept more explicit. We came up with a great story that will be followed with mini games in it. We really hope that this kind of approach will attract potentials to IKEA and with that will improve the employer brand which is one of the goals of our assignment.
We were also happy that IKEA was really enthusiastic about the work we have done and looking forward how everything will look like in the end. However IKEA is not the only party that is interested in it, it is also interesting for us, because you can never know what will be the final product. So we will continue our work and try to keep everybody excited about the things we do.
If you are interested in the work that we have done you can check out our Design Document and also the posters, that give more insight about the games.
The most magnificent news for the past two weeks is that the research phase is finally completed. On Friday, 12th we were happy to present all that we have done so far to our assigner Colinda Dijkstra. The presentation went really well and our assigner was satisfied with our results from the research phase. The slides of the presentation can be viewed here.
So now we are off to start the concept phase and Charlie Mulholland already helped us to get through. One more time he gave us a useful workshop after which he gave us a task to generate 100 ideas about how our future product could look like.
“All ideas have value”
We are sure that brainstorming will be fun and after careful selection and considerations we will be able to pick 3 best ideas which afterwards will be produced into prototypes.
