Blog 14: Interview 3 Preparation

1.  Who do you plan to interview?  What is this person's area of expertise?
I plan to interview either Sean Bouchard or Elizabeth Swensen, who are my mentors and professionals in game design. They are two associates at the University of Southern California, and both specialize in educational video games. 

2.  Verify that you have called your interviewee to schedule an interview.  What is the date and time of the interview? 
Our next mentorship day is tomorrow, and it will likely take time around 4:00 PM.

3.  Phrase an open-ended question that will help you find research resources that would help to answer the EQ.
- What materials helped you most when you were still a student learning about educational video games? Why were they helpful?

4.  Phrase an open-ended question that will help you think about other useful activities you might do to help you answer the EQ (IC2, possible experts to talk to, etc).
- When you were first starting out in this genre of video games, what creative projects relating to them did you have yourself make?

5.  Phrase two open-ended questions that help you to understand your interviewee's perspective on an aspect of your EQ. 

- What would you say were the biggest weaknesses you had in your first developments of educational video games?

- In your words, what would you say are the most important components in an educational video game?

Blog 13: 10 Hour Mentorship Check-In

1.   Where are you doing your mentorship?

My mentorship is at the Game Innovation Lab at the University of California, in LA.

2.   Who is your contact?  What makes this person an expert?
My contacts are either Sean Bouchard, Elizabeth Swensen, and Tracy Fullerton. The one who made my phone call was Sean Bouchard due to the fact he was present. All three are experts in that they are all professional. All of them are either associate professors, or have a Masters in the Interactive Entertainment (video games). More importantly, two of them specialize in educational games, which revolves around my EQ. 

3.   How many  hours have you done during the school year? (Summer Mentorship Hours and Mentorship Hours should be reflected separately in your Senior Project Hours log located on the right hand side of your blog).
I have thus recorded 26 hours of mentorship during the year, and 22 had been done during the summer.

4.   Succinctly summarize what you did, how well you and your mentor worked together, and how you plan to complete the remaining hours.
So far, every mentorship day has been surprising or unique; our mentors allow us to experience what they would at the time. If there were a seminar taking place that they had to attend, they would bring us along. If there was a class lecture, they would have us shadow or even actively participate at the given opportunity. If they were working on the brainstorming aspect of the game, they would ask us for the help. Clerisse and I basically do what is available at the time, and it's exhilarating how unexpected it could be because it's always an additional detail to the whole field of game design.

Blog 12: Holiday Project Update

1.  It is important to consistently work on your senior project, whether it is break or we are in school.  What did you do over the break with your senior project?
Part of the pre-production of any video game is the prototyping, which come as both physical drafts and rough computer models. So, even though I won't have to actually develop the game until my second independent component, my first IC still requires me to familiarize with the software. I haven't logged these hours yet, but so far, I've have begun and playtested on the some files on the RPGMaker software. In particular, I've learned how to implement the dialogue of the characters (which is going to be really fun since I really hope to include cameos of students/teachers in the final product). I've also learned how to import portraits.  I've yet to actually log these hours.

I have done some minor documenting of the game's premise and puzzles, as well some physical drafts sketched on graph paper on one of the maps that this game will be taking place, which is the I-Poly Quad. But they're very, very primitive and have no place to stand before the eyes of the world yet.



2.  What was the most important thing you learned from what you did, and why?  What was the source of what you learned?

Specifically for learning how to use the software, I have been watching tutorials on Youtube by the channel known as Obrusine1 (who has been renamed as Novem). I've gotten the hang of one of the most fundamental "events" - a type of action in the RPGMaker - which is how to give dialogue to the characters. I can either do static dialogue for the non-player characters (NPCs), where the lines will be repeated every time you as the player character speak to them. Or, I can make the dialogue have options of choices and have conversations branch out differently (though nevertheless also be repeated).





While doing this I also personally learned also how to import character graphics (AKA the portrait that appears alongside the dialogue to signify who the speaker is). One of the available character sprites to use is Santa Claus, which I thought was funny, but there wasn't an image of his face in the current RPG Maker database to go along the dialogue. As a result, I decided to find one and add it myself. Each character face graphic is exactly 96x96 pixels; any larger would cut the face off. 

(this is the original image that was used. I did crop it and reduce the size to the designated area of pixels.)


(above Santa Claus's dialogue are the two optional routes the player could take with the conversation, with one being "...fine." and the other being "Please. Your family misses you. Go home." Santa clearly needs an intervention with his life, considering he seems to be trapped on an island as of now.)

The map, as you can see in the above image, is very basic; it's basically an island in the middle of the sea, but this is all for playtesting. The actual game will definitely not be taking place here.



3.  Your third interview will be a 10 question interview related to possible answers for your EQ. Who do you plan to talk to and why?

Out of the three mentors Clerisse and I currently have, I have actually only interviewed one of them. Sean Bouchard and Elizabeth Swensen are both viable candidates for interviews for me, and either way would be an excellent option. Not only are they my mentors, but both also specialize in educational games/game-based learning and were actually part of the inspiration to the EQ, which asks how we can maximize a player's learning experience in the game without making it boring.