Week 2

Week 2 is when the real work started! I worked mainly on the ESCAPE, making good progress on the animals that will be in my game. I also laid out some story ideas that I may want to pursue, seeing as the company focuses on educating and making people aware of the world's environment, my current idea is to make people aware of the rapidly melting ice in the Arctic, or near Greenland, although nothing is concrete as I am still in the early stages of the narrative.

On top of the story I have thought of a few ideas for the tool the player will use, I am currently thinking of a Sexton-type tool where the player will be able to measure angles on a Défis Nature card and complete puzzles. I made a couple of prototypes in order to test the mechanic, but the main issue is making something easy and intuitive to use. I have to keep in mind that the game will be played by young kids, many of whom will be playing with the aid of a parent, so the tool needs to be simple enough for a seven-year-old to manipulate independently, as the tool will be just used by the parent which we do not want. 

The Weekly meeting went well as I had my first week to report on, and seeing as Igor was not there due to him being away to present the newly released games, I made the points about the Game Design for the week, the team was impressed with my report as it had only been seven days I was there. although I did forget to mention Faites Vos Oeufs as I had not worked on it, Igor was meeting with the author that day so there were no changes that we knew of yet.

on Thursday we had a work seminar, where we met outside the office near Nîmes, a town outside Montpellier, in order to review the process we use to do projects, this meant reviewing timings and roles in the team, My main input was suggesting to priorities righting out the rules and testing prototypes of games, as it is something the team seemed to struggle with previously, they were surprised with my suggestion as they hadn't thought about prioritizing the rules in the past, usually only writing the rules at the end once they had done all the changes, E.G. the last project they had 3 weeks to write up the rules and put them into the rule book, but if they had written the rules at the start they would have had it done in a week and avoided panic, its always good to update the rules with the game, it keeps testing consistent and efficient.

I completed the translations for Dino Picnic, which was interesting as I could see how the instructions were made in order to be as readable as possible in French, but not everything translated correctly, meaning I had to make changes to the instructions in order for them to be more clear and readable

Another item that kept me busy during the week was meeting all the people who work in Bioviva, I had meetings with every department where they explained their work and roles in the business