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How Diversity and Inclusion Shaping Our Development Process

Here at Project Beanstalk, we are a group of diverse creatives seeking to build equity in the video game space for marginalized communities. But what does that mean? In short, it means creating spaces for all to not only have a seat at the table and have an active role in the various discussions being had.

As we wrap up Black History Month and go into Women’s History Month, we think it’s important to reaffirm our stance on adding diverse voices to the games industry and highlighting what we are doing in our development approach to bridge the gap. 

This is our three-pronged approach to adding our mark to advancing diversity and inclusion in the gaming space. 

Research and Development

  • We not only want to create fun experiences through games, but add social learning elements to encourage relatable, socially consensus design. One of the ways we approach design is to take learned experiences and personal growth from our diverse teams to show unique perspectives. We hope our experiences can help shape positive interactions for others.

    We also seek to better our understanding of issues tackled in our games. We provide personal training opportunities to our team and do through research on a variety of issues, like mental health and the historical context of marginalized communities. The combination of these aspects of research provide accurate representations of relatable experiences for our players. 

Game Development

  • Our medium of video games to portray storytelling only continues to rise year over year. In response to that, we have a responsibility to provide diverse perspectives as an option for players. That is where the role of indie studios like Project Beanstalk play a role. We want to use our games and platform to better educate people on the challenges various communities face.

    Our current game, Heart 2 Heart seeks to explore the role of empathy in our daily lives. One’s ability to give and accept empathy can have a dramatic impact on our mental health and the mental health of those around use. The collective experiences of our team and research done to better understand the link between empathy and mental health has shaped our development to create an engaging and heartfelt experience. 

Diversity Advocacy

  • We want to do more than just make games. We want to be advocates in the space to highlight the importance of representation in the games industry as a whole. Our founder, Isaiah Johnson, has partnered with a multitude of game incubators and investors in the games space to learn and educate on why representation matters. In addition to opening opportunities for the Project Beanstalk team to do the same, he is pushing to do more through speaking engagements at schools, panels, companies, or workshops. 

We think we’re off to a great start and hope you join us in working hard towards parity in the industry. If you would like to know more, you can follow up with us through our various social media below. For more info on Project Beanstalk, check out our website: https://projectbeanstalk.xyz/about-us/.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProjBeanstalk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/projbeanstalk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/project-beanstalk

Discord: https://discord.gg/vAG7hTr

Welcome to our game: Heart 2 Heart

Our team at Project Beanstalk is working hard on our first indie title, Heart to Heart. While the team is plugging away during pre-production, we want to give you a small glimpse into our project. 

Heart To Heart is an RPG game focused on human connection. What happens when we take the time to talk to one another to resolve problems? That’s the question we want to explore with our project. To get there, here’s some need to know info:

  • Hero of our story: Speaks is their name and healing hearts is their game. Speaks is on a quest to help people handle various issues through empathy.
  • Who: Five diverse characters in different stages in life. They suffer from various insecurities and Speaks, through the magic of emotion, aims to heal their heart. 
  • What: Speaks wills emotion into existence with magic! Magical combinations lead to different emotional states. What magic combinations will help heal the heart?
  • Where: In the land of Internia, various environments and weather conditions impact the citizens in different ways. Erasing feelings and twisting thoughts. Emotions are running amok in Internia!

We hope this gives you a first glimpse at our indie project. As we continue throughout our development process, you can expect more blog content diving deeper into Heart to Heart. You can join our Discord community and our Twitter for all the latest info on our game.

Join us at YTH LIVE 2020!

Join us on August 4th, 2020 at 9am as we publicly reveal Typo Trauma for the very first time! This will be at the conference YTH LIVE. Which is being coordinated by our sponsor Youth Tech health. For more information, visit the conference page at https://yth.org/ythlive/about/

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