Maximizing the impact of research

I actually really liked this class because it gave me alot to think about in terms of journal writing. In the beginning of the class I was looking at this from the perspective of research and not journals, as in writing research papers like I had to in my final years at my bachelors’ program.

I really loved how he delved into the question of “what is excellent research?”, because that is probably the core question everyone should be asking. If you want to maximize the impact of your research, you should probably make sure you research is good in the first place, and its difficult to make good research.

The definition of impact really stood out for me in the presentation, where it was defined as “an effect on change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” by the british government.

And I learnt about a bunch of little things, like apparently theres a witchcraft museum in falmouth? the whole thing about how as long as you’re making something you’re researching while doing it, and alternations between periods of doing, making and reflecting. I learnt about Tania Kryzvwinska and how she founded games and culture, and although I haven’t followed up onn this yet I still want to research on her, I even need to google something called “atune project” from falmouth.

I don’t think I’m going to ever be able to use the transfuser at Falmouth, but maybe just making great research matters alot.

Agile Workshops

If there’s any class in Falmouth that feels like a waste of my 3 hours, its probably the agile workshop class. It’s the one class I look the least forward to, and like I mentioned in my last journal, its not that agile is boring or useless, but I’m not going to learn much unless I work in a group over and over and make the right amount of mistakes.

nevertheless I guess I did get something out of the class. I think the most valuable thing so far is probably just to keep these six lines in mind:

Who is the feature aimed at?

What does the user want?

Why does the user want this feature?

As a ……,

I want to……,

So that……

Other than that, we started our first one week game jam, which was really fun, and there was alot to learn about, but I think this would be a good place to talk about management. I think in my group there were alot of flaws with management, partly because it happened very often that not everyone was always free at the same time as everyone else, and also partly because as much as I wanted to stand up, take charge and be the adult, make everyone work, I promised myself not to because I still wanted to stay in good terms with everyone regardless of how the game jams go. And I really didn’t want it to turn into a crunch because of me.

We tried to use MS Planner as well, and me and Gourav had a whole taskboard organised with the tasks and all, but we figured since no one was ever available at the same time as everyone else, we’re better off staying away from working in a sprint based system.

Agile micro-game-jam

The next week, in the agile class, we had a couple of little activities where we had to come up with some quick game design ideas for an imaginary client brief. I really loved this activity. The client’s brief was to make a game about monkeys targeted at 12-year-old kids, and it has to be a battle royale. And I kept wondering about how its possible to make a game about basically fighting and shooting and have it targetted to such a young demographic. I felt like just ripping off PUBG but with monkeys was just simply not going to work. It felt wrong.

I kinda had to separate a little out of my group to be able to think by myself about this, since the time constraints was also literally five minutes. First, I made a list of things with my team mates of all the things that you think about when you think of monkeys.

The notes on the different things started leading to some abstract concepts, the first one was about swinging, what if you could make a game that focused on the verticality/ swinging through trees nature of monkeys? Like spiderman but with monkeys and battle royale mixed.

Then we thought about a small plot as well, this one is my favourite. A lot of monkey memes and jokes are funny because we attribute them to humans, so the visual of a monkey playing a battle royale game like PUBG struck me as having some sort of interesting message worth exploring, this could also have a huge impact in the target audience which was basically just kids.

And then the last mechanic was basically what the whole group agreed on would be a good idea. The core idea was to mix in sea of thieves with monkeys and a battle royale. Since the game is targeted to kids, its probably a good idea to teach them something while they’re playing the game. A lot of battle royale games have a small focus on comradery but the basic idea is to shoot people down, and something about Sea of Thieves made it so that the focus shifts more towards advancing your group as a ship. We thought about having tree houses instead, inspired by that one Phineas and Ferb episode about tree house wars.

Unity

Somewhere along the line of my larger Game Jam, I felt like I wasn’t getting enough work done while everyone else was working much harder than me. It felt like I had just drawn up the designs on pieces of paper and asked people to implement them for me. 

So to keep myself occupied, I decided to go on my own journey and see how far I could get with making the game on my own, and actually, I got pretty close. Not gonna lie I’m pretty proud of myself for this. Keep in mind that the last game I worked on was literally combat by atari, so this is a pretty big step up.

I could get version control working, the whole game was working on the new input system as well, I actually coded a decent player controller which can probably be reused in my other games as well now, and I learnt so many other little things along the way. Things looked good in the unity department.

When I was getting towards the end I realised I was missing a lot of assets, so I started modelling assets for my version of the game, and most of them ended up getting used in the final build as well.

Overall, I learnt alot in unity this week and I’m very proud of myself. But at the same time, I have a feeling I might’ve pushed things a bit too far because I ended up breaking the screen on my mac, and now I need to go to Truro to get it fixed, and I just absolutely hate not being able to work for the coming week now.

Arts

It was a pretty dull week in terms of arts, and besides the assets that I worked on Unity, there’s not much else to show in terms of what I did this week. I did help with some of the aesthetics of the game, in that I suggested the core idea of the game, of a soviet raccoon trying to search for cake in an American governement’s house, and the whole house is designed to look like its a 50s American house. I wanted the levels to have this specific shade of blue because a lot of movies from the time used to use it to highlight anything that was placed in front of it, make it stand out.

But, I finally got my developed film back and there’s so many pictures here that I like. This was just a test film so I didn’t really push myself to get the perfect shot and all but for a test reel these shots are pretty impressive. Even the ones that I ruined kind of have an abstract feel to them, I love them all.

I even got the negatives back and they’re so precious and I’m not sure what I should do with them, maybe pin them on my desk?

Thinking of doing double exposures with black and white film next…

Long term goals

I think in terms of my progress towards my long-term goal, in a weird way this longer game jam has given me a lot of clarity.

I feel like there’s a couple of things that my mind has clearly set on that I need to get better at. I don’t think I communicate well enough, and that often keeps the whole team a little bit confused. This time around I couldn’t use agile, and while one could put the blame on the nature of the group and how everyone wasn’t always availbale at the same time, I also feel like it was partly my fault and if I just stood up for myself and somehow made everyone work together, maybe we could’ve functionally implemented agile. A part of me was also continuously worried if I was being too bossy and maybe that’s on me. Does agile work for such a project at such a timescale? I honestly have no idea, and I guess I won’t know until I try. For now this is what I’m working with though.

My coding skills are now getting better every week but this coming week is going to be rough because my laptop won’t be with me, since it’s display broke. But I think that even though I’m not quiet great at C#, its still an upward trajectory and for now and that’s good enough.

In terms of arts and design, I think that’s my strong suit, especially arts and thinking about what matters the most. I should lean into this side quite a bit more because there’s some serious potential. I should really take up more online classes on game design principles, as that really helped me through the game jam as well, and if I’m being honest I’ve only just started learning design. I’m also terrible at UX, UI, Graphic design and just generally gestalt principles stuff, so thats worth focusing in on more as well.

Anyway, here’s my card from this week.