In the week following St Patrick’s day, the project partners met in University of Galway in Ireland to continue work on developing the Simply4Emotions game. The meeting included a hybrid element and the primary focus during the two day meeting was concentrated on drawing upon the central findings of the literature reviews and the game schematic, which had been created at the Turku meeting, to progress the next stage of the game’s development, namely the game elements matrix. Game expert, Tobias Alf, began this process each day with a warm up exercise. The exercise on day one was particularly interesting and engaged the partners in descriptive communication of individual pieces of fragmented information to extrapolate and assemble a complete story.
The partners then worked in parallel groups over the two days to populate the game elements matrix, with regular full group discussions that helped to bring together and refine the specific components of the matrix. These are of course the early phases of development and there remain many decisions and refinements to be made over the coming months before these ideas and concepts can become the prototype game ready for testing. The partners also got to enjoy some spring sunshine and visit the historic quadrangle at University of Galway.
