Blog 9A: Reflection on gaming presentation

Reflection on the gaming project

As is obvious, we are human, and when we do things, not every point we want to make comes through. One point that I feel didn’t really come through in our game presentation is how the player achieves the goals and objectives in the game. We told the audience that there will be progressively harder problems through the game, and when we talked about the console design, we said, “math problems use the number pad, and word problems will use the keypad.” We didn’t really clearly illustrate that there will be a mix of problems; there will be word problems, math problems, problem-solving puzzles, and other problems that use a wide variety of skills, building upon those skills to achieve the main goal of the game – to learn.

Another thing that I feel didn’t really come through is how the player’s balloons get popped. We said that they get popped if the player gets the answer wrong, and that there will be a drop-down dictionary when we talked about the mechanics of the game. I feel that it could possibly be misleading that there is a dictionary for use in the game. The dictionary will be just for when the player needs to use one of the helps, and if the dictionary and other hints are used too many times, the balloons will start popping. The goal of our game is for the player to learn throughout the game, and if too many hints are used, they will not learn anything.

To make our presentation better, we could’ve easily put in a couple more sentences clearing up these things. If we really wanted to get the entire point across, we could’ve designed the game, coded it, and played it in front of the class, demonstrating everything needed to get the point across.

A strength we had, though, was that we illustrated clearly what the main goal of the game was. We were even able to give a more long-term goal for the game – to allow the player to “be able to pass the ACT.”

This was probably our strongest part of the presentation, because we all agreed on what the goal was to be before we started designing the rest of the game. We decided that our game should break away from the common element of violence, and give the player some worthwhile skill that will help them get through their education, which is the gateway to their career.