Similarly to the end of phase 1, we ended phase 2 with a presentation compiling our findings. My presentation for Fables boiled down all of the information I've collected over the past week into what I felt was most relevant to communicate, and like the previous presentation, I received live feedback from my class.
Whilst many of the comments reflected thoughts and ideas I'd already had, something that kept cropping up that I hadn't considered was the idea of a multiplayer game involving two characters. I think there might be an issue here when it comes to the practicality of story-telling - usually one character undertakes the personal development in a fable, and I would have to make some adjustments to make sure the story was impactful shared equally between two characters. It could work well, however, and communicate a moral in a practical way that the players experience.
With all of these ideas in mind, we began Phase 3, the prototyping phase. This is also the part of the semester where we can begin to collaborate and form teams. In my mind I'd already thought about working with Sid, who's research on seamounts sparked ideas about the setting for a story, and who has uncovered themes of togetherness and the community aspect of an eco-system. Sid wanted to collaborate too, but something I hadn't expected was that Kerris would approach us, wanting to merge together our themes with her theme of fantasy.
Following a discussion, we discovered that our main areas of interest were environment and the idea of working together. Anthropomorphised animals, potentially chimera, could be included as characters, and we are all happy with the idea of making a narrative-driven game, as long as it had compelling playability.
With this group formed, I'm not looking at the idea of prototyping stories so we have something to base game ideas on. I think if I can come up with a core message that we'd like to communicate through this game, it will help guide us in our creative process, and means we can be direct but varied in our approach in terms of different games we can make.