Until now, it had been really hard to conceptualize and visualize my project. From the moment that I enrolled for this until now, I had several ideas for my project, but none of them really got me. Some of my ideas were: to develop a 3D animation with Maya, create a stop-motion animation in Flash and design games for kids. I really want to develop an educational game not only for the challenge, but because I know, from a teacher and student’s perspective, how games help us to understand and explore the content to be studied in a very unique manner. Thus, I decided that I would develop a game for my 6190 project; however I still needed to know its content and subject. Also, I didn’t know very well how I would approach this game and which tool should I use.
One day, in an informal conversation with my roommate, we discussed about developing a game about diabetes. First, she explained me how important it would be to design and develop a game like this. She gave me an overall idea of the content and how I could approach. After that, I started to organize the information that she gave me and to imagine how I could create a game from that. I searched through the internet to see what kind of games have been developing in this area and it seems to me that are few and most of them are still in development phase. Even though, I knew what I was going to do (game) and the subject (diabetes), something was missing.
Therefore, I looked through books, visited some websites and talked with some co-workers and even got diabetes’ board game to understand how I could develop an online game from it. But today, discussing my idea with other peers I got confident about what I will do:
1) I will develop a non-entertainment digital game with its subject in diabetes. The game will focus on the educational aspect instead of the entertainment and fun part.
2) The game will be an instrument to inform and teach about diabetes to society in general.
3) The subject of the game will be type 2 of diabetes, which is prevalent among overweight/obese individuals, the elderly, and people with a genetic disposition for type 2 diabetes.
Although I have some goals and objectives to accomplish, there are still a lot of things that I need to work on. One of them is the feasibility of this product. I’m still not sure if I will be able to develop it. Thus, my goals for next week are:
· to have a flowchart of the game;
· to search tutorials and information on games;
· to discuss the content and its approach with my client;
I really hope that I can make this happen. We’ll see :)!!
