Team Reflection

Team reflections

a) On using iterative and incremental process

Using a more iterative and incremental approach was beneficial to our team because of the open-ended and evolutionary nature of our game design. We are continuously having new ideas of ways to make our game more enjoyable and how to evolve the storyline. Using an incremental approach over a more rigid process such as waterfall allowed us to freely change our initial design to discover possible flaws and defects in the early stages of implementation.

Unlike waterfall, where testing would be done last, we frequently tested our implementations and designs during each phase we were currently in. This greatly influenced how our team managed individual components in our version control, helping us find the differences in our version control before making any more changes. Within each meeting held, we examined each branch of a team members implementation to understand and discuss the importance and necessity of features newly made and made sure that it applied to our serious mapping and concept.

b) On designing/developing a serious game

We enjoyed thinking about game ideas and coming up with interesting game mechanics. It was more difficult than we thought to design a serious game that promotes critical thinking. Our biggest challenge was getting a deep mapping to our chosen serious game concept while still making it enjoyable. We came up with a lot of ideas for puzzle games but struggled to link them to our serious game concept. To achieve a deep mapping to critical thinking we broke it down into 4 sub-concepts and designed aspects of our game to better meet the sub-concepts.