STRICTLY EDUCATIONAL: AN EXPLORATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATIONAL GAME DEVELOPER, CLIENT, AND END USER

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.