Week 3 (Leading)

Throughout our lives we learn many things about ourselves. We are learning new things about ourselves all the time. For example, this week I learned something new about myself, and that is that I am a leader, not a follower. Forgive me for sounding arrogant or stuck up, I do not mean to. By this I do not mean that I am unable to follow people's directions, or that I do not respect others. By it I mean that I feel my work ethic whilst being in charge, (solo assignments, when I am leading a group,) is far superior to my work ethic when I am in a group and do not have creative control. 

I am a very creative person and sometimes it gets the better of me. If someone is to explain something to me, my mind often races off in many different directions about what exactly they mean. I have trouble taking things for what they are and my mind often warps what I am hearing into something that it isn't. This is especially frustrating on creative group assignments such as this one. My feelings towards this are that if I am in creative control of the project, I cannot misinterpret what needs to be done as I am the person creating it. 

I don't feel like this blog would have made a whole lot of sense to anyone who isn't me, but I gave it my best shot. Thanks for reading.

Week 2 (Game theorising)

Of all of the things I've learned this term I think the understanding that creating ideas for games isn't quite as simple as the general population seems to think.

This week we were asked to think of an idea with the subjects, "No violence/nobody gets hurt," "3rd person," and "Indoors." At first I thought of the idea to have an assassin who doesn't like hurting people so instead of doing so, tickles them onto the floor and puts them to sleep but after a little bit of  discussion our group decided that this wasn't tackling the subjects head on. The entire point of the subjects is to sway us away from violence completely, not finding a replacement for it and making a game that would otherwise be violent.

After some discussion we decided to go with a button sequence strategy game similar to this. The idea is that a mage is running up some type of tower / pipe and has to dodge obstacles using his spells and he will be prompted to use whatever spell corresponds with the key is on the block. Hopefully this goes well.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTdmYqgLa7Y

Week 1 (Prototyping)

If there's anything I've learned about prototyping is that it is time consuming and also a broad subject to grasp. What exactly is a prototype? Well to my understanding it is a very quick and simple version of a part of a game. The difficulty comes in when trying to make sure that there is a visible difference between the prototype and an end-state game.

For our particular prototype I feel like it wasn't exactly "prototype level" and was perfected far too much. I feel like, (in all honesty,) we should have spent less time on the code for it. Sure, it wasn't perfect within the first 3 hours but isn't that the entire point of a prototype? I feel like in future we need to focus on the idea of the game and not the actual polish of the mechanics and game itself. If the prototype is distinctively showing characteristics of the game we are wanting to make, then there is no need to continue working on it. I assume this can lead to bad habits, for example when we go to make the real game we may have spent too much time on the prototype code to throw it away and borrow from it, (or use it entirely.)