Thunk is a party game centered around creativity through divergent thinking
User Research, User Interface Design
Drexel University (Junior Design Project)
January 2020 - June 2020
Our team initially started with the idea of building a game which focuses on enhancing creativity, and would be based in a social setting aiming for a fun and memorable experience.
It can be played amongst friends or as a creative warmup in the workplace. Players go through six rounds of prompts and must come up with as many responses as they can for each prompt. Each round also has a twist. These “switch-ups” add constraints to the prompts that players must work around. The random pairings of these two components give each playthrough of Thunk variability and replayability.
For the first few weeks we ran with the temporary name Project Dali, named after famed artist Salvadore Dali given this Dali was selected to embody the ideals of bizarre dreams and surrealism, though the latter idea was later dropped. We anticipated the final game would be focused on creative thought and pushing the party of users outside the box. As the project developed, we outgrew the temporary name Project Dali.
After long internal discussions and narrowing down a pool of names, we settled on 'Thunk' as the name to embody the mood of the game which is to be creative or thought provoking whilst having fun.
We adopted an agile workflow with a 3-step creative cycle for this project, aimed to improve inclusion and divide the work better allowing a scope for faster and more changes:
Right from the beginning, we wanted to interact with our players to gain feedback to help us better develop the idea behind Thunk. We ran them through sample questions that were based on a creative exercise conducted at the Rhode Island School of Design developed by Industrial Design Prof. Cas Holman.
We also gathered data on what other party games our players enjoy. The 3 games that came up most frequently were Fibbage XL, Quiplash 2, and Drawful 2.
The main takeaways were that in order to make a digital social game engaging, there needs to be some sort of personality to the game itself, like a game show host.
From the interest interviews, we also derived user personas and journey maps. Each persona was based around college students, who we identified as our primary target audience, because they have ample time and space to socialize with others their age and a desire to stretch their creative minds.
The journey maps developed from each persona allowed us to focus on the pain points of each and help us better understand how we can design for them.
Each member of the team was tasked with sketching out wireframes for the project based on how they perceived such an application to work. With our creative juices flowing we developed several sketches for evaluation, and eventually progressed towards mid and then high-fidelity screens.
The final product of Thunk runs on NodeJS and Socket.IO. NodeJS was settled on because it was decided by the team that other server side languages, like PHP, would not be able to handle the dynamic server-side actions that were to be built. Socket.IO was a new technology for the development team to work with. Socket would allow multiple users to connect to a room simultaneously and communicate between devices.
Creating Thunk was a learning experience for everyone involved. The final product may not be perfect, nor really considered complete by the standards of what we set out to do, but each step of the way yielded something new for each member of the team.
Foremost is a better understanding of how to better plan for a project, especially when that project involves unfamiliar technologies. Also, we are all walking away with lessons learned on the importance of constant and clear communication between team members. Although what is arguably the most important lesson we learned is employing better time management because on this project, more than any we have worked on in the past, it became clear just how much our team members are reliant on our own work in order to move forward with theirs.
