With the interactivity
and immersion of players into video games, rising development costs, and
heightened expectations from AAA developers video games need to make sure they
hit their target market more than ever. This is something that is less extreme in
the educational game development space; but ultimately true with limited grant
funding, limited development time within a student developer’s schedule, and
how rapidly a recently leased student content creator will need to learn the
space and needs of the client. When a student is brought on late into a
development cycle, it can become troublesome when they are required to meet new
developing features on a changing project. This paper looks over how one team
approached this issue, with a focus on meeting the needs of a group of American
high school teachers. Within this paper, the focus is how they tackled the
issue, and how the teachers reacted to the end prototype, with some insight
into the older prototypes of the project. Throughout it they had reinforced the
ideas that communication, data validity, and set contract goals are important
identifiers for project success. Teachers looking at video games care more
about the data being valid and clearly communicated more than if a game is fun
or laden with features and mini-games.