✓ Realistic Prospects

Hey, it's Claire! As the year winds down, we're scrambling to put together the "big picture" of our project into one complete piece to present to the class. We recognized from the beginning that this would be a challenging task. While we might have bitten off more than we could chew with this end-of-the-school-year deadline to complete a chapter of a visual novel with no prior experience, it's been an awesome learning opportunity. We've shifted the focus of our end goal for this school year to be more realistic when taking into account what we've had the time and skills necessary to accomplish in a short period of time. Our story board--which has taken up a lot more time than we initially anticipated due to our desire to implement emotional intelligence aspects--is nearing completion, and we have a solid beginning, middle, and end established. We know where we're going; now it's just a matter of getting there with the completion of our script. Character development is also complete, and we have finished sprites as evidence of having achieved this milestone.

Our revised goal is to finish a detailed storyboard by the school deadline. This entails mapping out the core plot as well as branching developments, which depend on choices made early on. It's more difficult than you would expect to keep track of which choices will lead to each ending! We have to create specific combinations of choices, not to mention engineer them so they don't deviate too far from the core plot. If mapping out all plot choices proves to be too difficult, we'll at least shoot for completing a detailed storyline and some dialogue. We also hope to present several completed CGs, character sprites, and potentially cut-scenes to show our visual progress. The title screen for the game is in development as well, but who knows how long coding will take! 

No matter what, though, the school deadline by no means marks the end of this project. We intend to continue developing it over the summer and see where it takes us. (This plot is just too exciting to leave dying, okay?) We look forward to updating you in our next blog post!

- Claire S.

It's Shahnoor! Okay guys, so I tried to get into contact with Dr. Daniel Goleman, an EQ researcher, and I sent him a link to our outline for the choices and scenarios. I signed in to my Google Docs and saw an anonymous viewer and the only one with the link is Daniel Goleman! I was mentally perspiring, in fact, I could feel my brain juices seeping out of me... If that makes any sense. Still, he was there for a good 5-7 minutes just looking at the script and after he left I immediately read through to make sure there weren't any mistakes (though I shoulda done this before). As I read through it, I realized that the choices totally missed a good chunk of Emotional Intelligence and they only hit one aspect which was "being able to deal with people"--aka Social Intelligence. I'm pretty sure that's what Goleman thought because I didn't get any response. He probably thought, "This girl doesn't know what's she's doing." :( The whole week I thought, "Oh my God, you idiot." But I realized that in every big project people will make mistakes--whether they be big or small--that will steer their work in a better direction. Now my job is easier because I don't have to worry about measuring EQ as a whole, considering that the choices only pertain to a few parts of EQ, which just complicates things. I can find a separate measurement for just social choices which goes perfectly with the script! Thankfully, I was able to catch my mistake and now I am going to act on it: do more social intelligence research.

- Shahnoor J.