The course material this week revolved around player feedback, designing prototypes in Figma, and the university’s policy on generative AI. In short, AI may help us study by assisting us in coming up with brainstormed ideas or proofreading our work, but it is never allowed to act as an alternative for our work or an excuse for procrastination. According to what we learned this week, my team developed its AI policy, which includes mentioning any AI tool we utilize.
We also had an extensive discussion as a team this week based on the playtest feedback we received previously. This led to a major disagreement regarding the core focus of our game. One team member believed that since the protagonist is a student at school, the main gameplay should revolve around academic learning and studying content. However, the rest of the team and I strongly disagreed. We argued that because Backchat is fundamentally about understanding an autistic protagonist, the gameplay absolutely must focus on the barriers of social communication. Navigating social interactions is the true challenge we want to highlight. In addition, we learned how to create a testing matrix to gather qualitative information about our game, which we will use to test our social mechanics moving forward.