Bill and I met with Tiffany McVeety. Bill worked with her years ago. Now, she's an entrepreneurial mentor, and she's written two books. She gave us some good advice--some for Bill and some for me.
I started looking for learning games that were similar to ours. There aren't many, and they're all designed quite differently. I also found the http://www.elearningguild.com/, and through them, found a line on other resources to find more learning games. In short, I came away confident that the learning mechanisms I have in mind are pretty unique.
I also started looking for an "advisory board", or just a collection of mentors that could help me with game design and implementation. Bill started building his advisory board too, but in the business arena. I found GameMentorOnline, and signed up with a mentor. Since my hubby is making his own game, he's now on my advisory panel too. Thirdly, once I have a prototype, I'm going to pay for a review and advice from Clark Alrich Designs, since I've become a huge fan of his books and ideas.
My GameMentorOnline mentor helped me choose a tool by suggesting questions that I needed to prioritize. I was looking at tools in terms of what would be the most prevalent/popular in the coming years (hint: HTML5 and Javascript). I was also omitting 3D tools because Bill and I got some rather curt feedback from a Game Startup Bootcamp judge, "the very subject matter is naturally 2D". Uhm, what? I must've written the game description very poorly, then. Anyway, my mentor said I should be focusing on these high-priority questions:
- What tool will help you make your game faster and closer to your mental picture?
- How do you intend to distribute it?
- Do you want to ship it on multiple devices?
The answers for me were: Torque 3D, stand-alone install, and no.
To answer those questions, my hubby said, "You need to make a storyboard. How do you know what you need in a tool without making a storyboard for your game to expose issues you don't yet know about?" I resisted at first, because in all the game design books I read and courses I took, none talked about making storyboards. Then I realized, of course they didn't! They're based on FPS games! Mine's a mystery-driven learning game. So, I made a storyboard for my ideal game, but keeping things very simple, and WOW, progress!! Some issues with gameplay came up, but then so did some spontaneous solutions that I never would've thought of otherwise. Plus, gameplay patterns started to emerge that will define our mechanics. Plus plus, I realized 3D is the way to go. It's how you get deep immersion in a story.
It's so strange, but now that the storyboard and tool decision are done, they're like the framework to hang other stuff on. Like, when I get an idea about the visual design of the world, I now have a way to record it and judge if it'll work. If I think of a challenge for the player, or a cool aspect to add to the game, I can see where/how it'll fit in.
Cool. Onward and upward. I took another contract with Garage Games so I need to drop the game for a week to get a strong foothold on the project there, but hey, my job is symbiotic with the game. :) Can't wait to start building the world. Oh, but first, the next challenging task is to design the database of game and player data, cause that'll tell me if the structure of events, prerequisites, clues, etc, that I pictre is going to work.
Wish I'd gotten together an "advisory board" sooner. :)
