Course Summary - Phase 1

It's been a long time in coming, but here is the first real blog post for the Scholastic Collab Studio Fall 07 Course Blog. The subject of this post will be a short summary of the first phase of the course.

The first four weeks of the course were devoted to Phase 1 design work. The main goals of this phase were to identify a basic design objective and then allow groups of students to make proposals for how to achieve that objective. The design objective for this phase was to conceive of a casual immersive world for 8-12 year olds that was themed around monsters and focused at least in part on supporting sophisticated user-generated content (as distinct from simple personalization). The code name for the project was Monster Quest.

In order to achieve this goal, we began by looking at the competition in casual immersive worlds and kids user generated content. This content was introduced in lecture and then explored in more depth in Assignment 1, which focused on market research.

Once we has established the basic state of the market and design space in which we were working, we began focusing on refining our vision for the game. In order to do so, we divided the class into four groups for Assignment 2. Each group spent a week focused on a core aspect of the site -- economy, player role, quests (i.e. game experiences) and monsters (i.e. game characters).
The results of Assignment 2 were reported back to the class the following week. After listening to each report, we then divided into four new groups for Assignment 3. In this assignment, each group received the same task - use the work of the four groups and your own ideas to come up with a creative brief for Monster Quest. The creative brief was intended to present a full vision for the game, from editorial tone to game mechanics to look and feel.

After an intense week of work, each group presented their Assignment 3 efforts to the class. Once the presentations were finished, David and Isaac (the course instructors) took each of the briefs and condensed them over the course of a week into a single creative vision to be used in Phase 2 conceptual prototype work.