Talk about a big week. Sorry for our blogosphere silence, but we’ve been on the road with key members of our 7 Generation Games staff in North Dakota this week.
Our CEO, Dr. AnnMaria De Mars, our CMO, Maria Burns Ortiz, and our cultural consultant, Dr. Erich Longie, spent the week meeting with educators on both the Spirit Lake Nation and on Turtle Mountain.
Between pitching our game, showing off the updates and progress we’ve made on the game, installing the game on seemingly countless computers, being interviewed for the local TV news, working on the next game, interviewing intern candidates, applying for another demo event, getting feedback on what we’ve got so far and making contacts and connections as far as people we should reach out to next, it was an incredible and incredibly busy week.
On Thursday, we met with a local TV reporter who was doing a story on our game for the evening news. Then our staff met with educators from Fort Totten (Spirit Lake), including the wonderful teachers who allowed us to use their classrooms as beta testers last fall – when our game was good, but let’s just say nothing like it is now. It’s not quite like comparing the graphics in Tecmo Bowl to Madden, but let’s just say we’ve come a long way.
We were thrilled to be able to show them the changes we’ve made and even more thrilled to get some amazing suggestions from them as far as how we can make Spirit Lake: The Game even better. And we were grateful to have them come and meet with us on their own time — because they’re on summer vacation.
Friday morning (and if you know anything about AnnMaria, you know it takes a momentous event to get her up before noon), we hit the road and headed to Belcourt to meet with the always amazing Carol Davis and one of our newest favorite people, Debbie Gourneau. It was also great to meet Tamara Patneaud. We look forward to staying in touch with them as we work on Game 2.
There’s a lot of work still to be done, so we’re fortunate to be working on something we really believe in and that our work brings us together with so many great people.