May 2019-Present || 14 Weeks || Team Size: 6
About
Village Builder is a real-time strategy, village construction management game for school children in Sub-Saharan Africa. The game features prosocial objectives with cognitive reasoning and planning goals. The game serves as an alternative to traditional computerized cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT), like Brain Powered Games 2.0. It is being used with HIV infected children in Malawi and Uganda and is currently in a clinical research trial to gauge effectiveness. The game is part of a suite of cognitive training games developed by the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab at Michigan State University and supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health. My team was the fifth team to work on the project.
My Role
During this project I was a producer and QA. I spent most of my time setting up meetings, keeping the Jira updated and clean, and testing the games for any bugs. Through out the project I created multiple timelines and sprints for the members of the team to understand what the projects future looked like. We communicated often with the director of the GEL Lab and the researchers who was funding the project.
Challenges
Brain Powered Game was passed on through to five teams during its development. This effectively meant every team had to learn the systems left behind by the previous team. The code base was incredibly difficult for the programmers to follow and required a massive amount of time to understand. The project itself also had a lot of bugs. 90% of the project was spent fixing bugs from previous years. We eventually got it into a stable condition, and were expanding on the concepts given to us.
We were also given tasks by the researchers at very short notice. This shifted the teams goals half way through the project due to a big announcement. We were tasked to make the game in different locations. This shift drastically changed all the developers work schedule.
MSU GEL Lab
The Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab is a company run through Michigan State University. it focuses on educational and experimental games to help the daily life of users.
