Aloha, Storytelling was a great way to begin in the pre-production phase of this Video Game Workshop. Building a story based game play prototype will give immediate satisfaction and focus allowing participants to plan, channel energy, and gear up.
The reasons for developing the story, graphics and mechanic is to develop a framework for the building of their game prototype. Learning while developing their story can be a unique way of developing both skill and creativity. 
As participants begin to make their first game, they quickly began to dream big. The story and game mechanics are relating to not only ‘Aina the lands but to the impact that people and visitors affect the Hawaiian lands and natural environment. There was a lot of discussion about game mechanics that could be applied to the mini games within the larger game. The challenge will be how they are going to choose the culture based values with activities in the game play. And then, there is the enhancement through sound design and animation which will certainly bring it all together within the cut scenes. Everyone was eager to begin the afternoon, excitement was building.
It is easy to grow the ideas beyond what could be made if there were infinite time and resources, but inevitably, if there are too many mechanics or content they will have to reduce to get to the core of the story based game play. It is challenging to remember that the goal is to have a game that is fun and playable at the end of a fixed time.
It can be challenging to select the best idea from a large set of alternatives yet it has to be done in order to have a finished game. Sometimes, the perfect decision is really hard– you just need to make it as soon as possible and make the chosen parts extraordinary.
Mahalo