Agile Practices

If I’m being honest I’m starting to think that the hardest class for me is the agile class. And it’s not that I hate Agile or its difficult for me to understand or that I just don’t find important. I actually do find it really important.

But it feels like we’ve been sitting in class for 3 hours every week and being told some variation of the same thing, and this is all stuff that you don’t really learn with a notebook and a pen.

But anyway, in context of the last agile class, it often it feels like different people have different perspectives on what comes under pre-production, production and post-production, and even though there’s nothing wrong between the perspectives, it is a reflection on the philosophy of the work.

Many people from India who have worked in industries have a very different Idea on what pre production is because companies over there never really get a say in what something looks like, they have already been given a brief with specifications and a thought out artwork to build on, it becomes the indian company’s job to execute and make a final product.

In my old college we were taught to be much more independant, and were taught how to make an animation from scratch. Because of this to me, pre production and concepting means heavily investing yourself in the arts and design and figuring out what works (which seems to be the same mentality as what we taught here). I’m not really sure how its going to work once I get into the industry here, I guess it heavily depends on the company and how much power they’re willing to give the different people on the final look and feel of the game.

I quite liked the little diagram as well, I don’t know why its something that stuck in my head and I’ll probably carry it with me in the future.

I guess a big change is that before I used to work on art and now its design, so instead of focusing on the aesthetics or how something makes the user feel, I’m more focused on what mechanics work and how I can make a game fun.

I think I had a pretty good question to ask as well last week, “If agile focuses on making iterations of an MVP, doesn’t it mean that developers are forced to make something that works, and not something that’s efficient, elegant or bug-free?”

I’m not sure if I’m satisfied with the answer I got, which was that at this scale making good code isn’t so important. Which is fair but what happens when I do work at that scale?

Game Jam

I was hoping for a similar workshop as the previous work where I can sit and focus on learning unity, but I guess this works too. A part of me feels that I should be more heavily invested with learning the tools before I try to master the mechanics and such, especially while I still have time.

Anyway though, it’s not that there’s not a lot to take out of a game jam. We were given the randomly generated optional theme of “autonomy”, and decided to make a game on a robot (close enough). Making sure we weren’t trying to make anything too complicated, we knew we wanted an arcade style game. Eventually the game was a platformer where the player was a part of a robot that had to collect its parts in each level, and in the end the robot finally exits the factory into the forest and finds freedom.

I won’t lie, when I entered, I was really tired and needed caffeine, and didn’t feel like working at all, but the moment the game jam started, everyone else’s motivation and the idea of creating a game in under 3 hours was enough to have me motivated to work on it.

It really helped that I could talk to both the programmer and the designers, because often it happened that the designers were pushing in mechanics that were either unnecesary to the core gameplay, or were too hard for the programmer to implement in under 3 hours. It also helped that the programmer knew how to do his job effectively, with the speed and efficiency at which he was working I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have had a working game in the end without him.

Something that felt odd was that we were missing artists, which meant that there was no real originality or purpose-built art for the game, and we heavily relied on AI to fill in those blanks. Makes me wonder how far we can get once we have artists working on the game as well. And also, I find it ironic how our theme was autonomy and the art was made on AI.

Level design is something that we definitely need to work on. I felt that for under 3 hours we had some really great mechanics in place and we even had one mechanic that added something to the core gameplay or theme of the game. the whole mechanic of how the robot kept building up on every level was interesting and could definitely be scaled up, it also provided the player incentive to play through all the levels. As long as the player was working to build the complete robot, it was a good enough core loop. But I felt there was more to be desired, a couple more decent core loops would have done so much more than throwing in mechanics that probably didn’t matter. I’m not sure if a boss fight, or a shooting mechanic, or enemies were necessary in hindsight.

There’s a lot to look forward to in the next game jam. I think this is a better format for the workshop as long as I’m making my effort to learn unity on the side as well.

Unity

I finally have a MVP! and I’m really proud of it as well. Just that I won’t be going forward developing it more now.

There’s three levels, when a player gets shot the level changes, and on the last level it goes back to the first one again. I know, how sophisticated!

I’m not gonna be developing it any further because I think this is about good enough for me to be satisfied with it and move on to do something more complicated. I’m gonna start getting back on the Udemy Unity course I was taking when I was in Bangalore. Last I was at I was still making something basic trying to learn the little things around unity and all, but the next chapter in the same course is going to be about making a first person shooter game, and I think thats a good achievable target to set my eyes on.

Overall my progress in the unity department was pretty good. I think I set my eyes on something achievable some 2 weeks back and I got there, and thats good enough for me. I feel like I’m slowly getting the hang of a lot of different things in unity, and when I was in Bangalore I remember thinking to myself “I’m never going to get comfortable with unity at this rate”, safe to say I couldn’t be more proud now.

I even used version control for this project, so I guess whoever reads this will be able to access my game by clicking on the link. (hopefully this works)

But yeah, gonna move on now.

Long term goals

I feel like since i started the month, i made a lot of progress on my thoughts about my long term goals. I know now, because of my experience through game jams, and through talking with people, that I seem to work best as a system designer, and I tend to do well with pre production artsy stuff. I think through game jams and other activities I’m learning alot about myself, and the more game jams I have, the more design I learn, I’ll eventually have a solid idea on exactly what I’m best at. I keep looking at Linkedin ads everyday, trying to figure out the next job I can get, and there are a couple positions available for “Game Design Intern”, and although thats probably not a big long term goal, thats a decent achievble goal over one year, and only through more experiences can I build some more clarity on how I work best and what skills help me get better at my job.

Arts

This week, I borrowed the graphic novel ‘Sabrina’ from the public library. Although I haven’t yet started reading it, I find the art style beautiful. Makes me think about the conversation I had with some friends today about how hyper-realism in games is beginning to become ugly.

I think there’s a very real place in video games for experimental art styles. Obviously there are people who get into video games because they just want to simulate the real world, but there’s also plenty of people who play games because they see it as a work of art. I keep comparing films to games, but experimental art styles to hyperrealism in games is a bit like animation to live action in films.

We also talked about mobile games and console games, and while I defended mobile games, I could definitely see why they were against it, with statements like “mobile games is the death of gaming”. I still carry the opinion that its the most accessible gaming device and has some very real potential, but we need to make good games. We can’t just make paywalled subscription-based cheap garbage. Gaming is an art, and art contributes to culture and society. And again, carried from the book “reality is broken”, we have a very real opportunity here to make some good games that play an effect on everyday people.

I think when I have money next month, I’ll buy the game Lumino City. I’ve wanted to play that game for a while now and I think now that I’m in a good spot to think about art styles and such, its worth diving into that game, and “the making of lumino city”. 

I’ll obviously be open to more suggestions and will do my own research and bookmark different art styles as and when I come across them, but for now this is a very achievable goal.

The reason I’m so broke this month though, is because I finally bought myself a film camera! It’s a Canon FTb, it was probably built in the 70s, and even though it needs some cleaning and maybe a little bit of repairing its still in fairly good shape. The light meter probably doesn’t work but thats ok. I even went out last morning and shot my first roll of film, just to experiment with, and will be waiting till the end of the week so I can get my developed photos back. Because of this, I dont have alot of photos to share this week, but here’s a picture of my camera.

Conclusion

I started this thing last week where I rated myself every week on the amount of progress I made. I quite like it, reminds me of this asian wise word thing kaizen I heard a long time back, which means “continuous improvement”.

Here’s this week’s card