New directions

After some time out due to personal circumstances, I'm back working on Glass Ceiling. I've had lots of ideas in the meantime so keen to get properly stuck in.

I presented my game concept last week to Jon Torrens, Jarek Francik, and the other Game Design students. I was pleased with the responses, although not surprised to note that most of the excited reactions came from the women in the room. Although I really want Glass Ceiling to be played by men, this session confirmed to me that I need to be realistic about its appeal to male players.

To address this, we discussed two contrasting options - either I embrace this and market to women with the hope that men will end up playing as a result of curiosity/recommendation, or I go a bit sneaky and actively market to men by obscuring the game's feminist nature. I don't like the idea of deceiving potential players and prefer to be unashamed about my sociological message so I have decided to embrace it.

We also debated the merits of different platforms for this game. I originally conceived it as a board/card game in digital form but reverted to an RPG PC game for my proposal to allow for greater single player depth. However, in discussion we concluded that the social impact of the game would be more powerful in multiplayer and even more so face-to-face. That pushed me to conclude that the original board/card game concept had more potential, at least for the first iteration of the game.

One of my fellow students suggested a really exciting opportunity for the game too, which is the potential for selling it to businesses for diversity and anti-sexism training. Since I have previous experience in people management and training, I think I have a strong background for being able to deliver this not only as a game for playing in this environment but also with the service of guided play sessions, which will work really well with a board/card game.

So, watch this space for the next steps of Glass Ceiling including gameplay, artwork, character development, and physical components.