Team 19 - College Journey Sim

Inspiration

Most of our team have older siblings or know other people who have entered college and found themselves struggling to balance their free time due to their increased workload and responsibilities introduced by college. And as most of us are going to start college the next year, we also wanted to convey what responsibilities we are going to have to face and hopefully help incoming college students to better succeed in college through what we learned from the experience of our older siblings.

What it does

The game is essentially a decision-making resource-management game (stress, money, and grades) that slowly deplete with time and are altered by the choices chosen by the player. The game hopes to replicate the issue an early college student will face and show the player that they have to make balanced choices in order to succeed.

How we built it

First, we planned out a number of different scenarios into our notebooks and created a tree-map to organize our ideas into the order we wanted our game to progress in. Each of us came up with different scenario and sequences that we thought would best convey our social issue to the player and then discussed we each other in order to combine our ideas into one working product.

Then, we set our priorities for what we needed to develop in our game. Everyone was given a task in order to create the wireframe of our product. Once the wireframe was completed, we each worked on a separate portion of the code within different scratch projects to see if they could work independently before coming together again and working to make each of our code compatible with one another. Once we got the core gameplay of our game working, we slowly added more and more features to our game, essentially polishing it up.

Finally, we asked our facilitator to test our game and to give input as to what we should improve upon whether it be in the gameplay or in trying to better convey the social issue.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was the amount of time we had to work on our project. We had developed a large and broad idea for our game but due to time constraints, we had to limit the scope of our game and focus more on the backbone of our core gameplay while introducing enough elements to convey our game's message of the struggles a new college will likely face which increases the likelihood of them dropping out.

Another challenge we ran into was making the player sympathize with the game's protagonist and understand the struggles that they face. We wanted to play around with different ways of making the player feel some form of stress and we ultimately decided on a "timer" like mechanic which forces the player to lower their stress levels within the game in order to progress without having to rush a decision and prioritizes the player to make balanced choices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

We learned that we should keep our ideas and scope small to begin with before expanding onto bigger and more complex ideas. We discovered from our early failures that trying to develop a large idea without a strong foundation leads to chaos and disorganization which only delayed our product. We also learned the importance of the timeframe that we are given so as to create a quality project that we are given to the best of our abilities