Project Preparation
Create a Trello Page
Create a Trello page for the project that you will use to present from. Make sure all teammates have access to it and make it public! All members or your team must have a link the Trello page from their mywebspace page. Invite @profwarren to your board. Make me admin. Add Activity Timer and GitHub power-ups.
Alternatively, you may use another project management tool other than Trello, however, you must make sure that it provides most of the functionality defined on the Project page. It also must allow a user to search for all of the contributions of a given user over a given time period. This all must be provided in the free tier, unless you are paying for it (e.g., HackNPlan doesn't allow searching like this in the free tier)..
Define Your Roles
Clearly identify the roles of each teammate. Divide up artist, programmer, and level design roles. Choose team leads. Minimially, you must have a Team Lead (responsible for team communication and organization) and a Scrum Master (responsible for backlog, Trello organization). Often, in small teams, these roles are handled by the same person. The person with these roles must have production roles as well (e.g. UI design, sound design, programming, art).
Unknowns + Challenges
Create a list of the biggest unknowns and challenges in your project. What are your challenges? What don't you know how to do? What don't you know about the project? These could be technical in nature, design-oriented, or content/audience related in an educational game.
Design Pillars
Start thinking about your design pillars and attempt to identify a few. Some may be defined for you based on the project you choose. See the Design Pillars section of the Guidelines section on the Project page for more information. Also refer to the following article. Make sure some address player experience goals (i.e., we'd like the player to feel X). It's OK if they change during development.
Research
Start to collect games, collections of games, or resources that you will use for research purposes. Find games with similar goals, that solve similar challenges, have common interactive scenarios, or use similar aesthetics. You will be expanding this research into its own document. I just want you to start the information gathering process.