Weekly Blogs (Session work)

Week 1

Introduction week, for the first few weeks, we were suggested to research things that we are interested in but not related to games and plan our targets and deadlines

About topic I’m interested in:

My biggest interest aside from games is Alternative fashion, especially Lolita/ Rococo style clothing.

For my plans: I am going to research lolita fashion, such as the history, famous brands of it and more. I am also making a moodboard of the impression that lolita fashion gives me

Week 2:

After a week of research, we elaborate our ideas into 4 themes and discuss them in our session.

Mine are Body structure, Alternative fashion,Collage and Nature (Forest).

Body structure: It can be apply to character design, and I have been researching of Daikon body structures– Giant head, big eyes, extractive hand and legs sizes with a tiny body

Alternative fashion: My most interested topic, I have researched a movie related to lolita fashion, fresh brand and also the OG brand of lolita fashion

Nature (forest): I saw many examples of blending nature into art and fashion/handcraft , but I seldom see people blending art elements into nature. I would like to do something like Spider web with lace structure, flowers with beads structures, tree barks as bohemian style leather with branded bags handcrafting skills (Miu miu, Bottega veneta)

Moving collage: There was a “sinking town trend” on TikTok, people do storytelling with collage animation, I love the circus, vintage aesthetics and I love it so much, it gave me an idea of making them as my UI designs.

Week 3

The whole class did a presentation about our 4 topics and gave feedback to each other. Surprisingly, my most expected topic, lolita fashion,was found unsatisfying. To conclude, most of my feedback was saying, specific movies and brands are limiting my creativity. Instead, I should consider expanding the nature idea as it is interesting.

After the presentation, we were asked to select a topic from four as further research. I picked nature x handcraft as there will be more interesting stuff to discover in nature.

Present slides:

Body structure:

Alternative fashion

Nature x handcraft

Moving collage

Week 4:

We had a collage workshop for this week’s section, we were required to make a collage as a way to introduce our project theme (topics), and we needed to include some large fonts as explanation. I was making my collage based on the theme of nature x handcrafts,

I had pictures of gardens to present my theme, puzzle game pieces at the corner to tell my game is relaxing, ancient decoration and art style showing my game’s aesthetic. Women in glamorous x nature style present my ideal character design.

After that, we divided into groups, picked one of our topics and guessed the thoughts of politicians, scientists and philosophers towards the topic, to see topics in different perspectives. My group picked my topic, and we think….:

Week 5

We had a second presentation about our topic, this time, we took a look at a specific topic and did a more detailed research about it. I introduced a brief idea of nature and handcraft. This time, I looked into different handcraft techniques (sewing, lace making) , saw how they are made and showed some of my experimental work of actually combining handcraft elements into nature.

Surprisingly, comments I received were better than my first presentation, many of us find this topic interesting and gave me some good suggestions:

I would definitely reference with their suggestions of making a knitting/ sewing game, the mechanic of the game will be bobbins

Week 6:

We were introduced about game poet,

Week 7

Feedback week, I have done some work right before the feedback, a character design, a prototype concept art and started my project proposal (GDD) so that it will be easier to give feedback on.

My game’s inspiration: Early flash games, easy to understand, difficult to play it good, stressful and fun

Key impression: Gorgeous, Vintage, Detail sketching

Feedback received: Think of goals and audiences

provide reason of why making anime like artstyle/ the body structure like that

Unity skill gap, talk to Ross and try to start on simple prototype

Week 8:

Tutors invited us to talk to groups of three, I was with Rosie and Esi. After hearing Esi’s braiding game idea, Adam suggested we work together as we are sharing similar game mechanics.

	Me	Esi
Mechanic	Bobbin lace	Hair braiding
Narrative	Don’t have much idea	Childhood trauma (Have a well developed idea)
Characters’ body structure: Head-to-body proportion	1:4	BJD body structure (large head, small body)
Environment	Handcraft x nature fantasy world	salon

To be honest, I found interest towards Esi’s game idea before the group sharing, I really appreciate how she embraces her culture through games. After the sharing, we found our ideas are supporting each other,I was so glad that Esi would like to work with me. We had a little chat and we decided to combine our ideas together

Week 9:

We did a presentation about our 3 game idea

Esi and I have a better understanding about each other’s concepts after reading our slides. I really liked the split view prototype that Esi shared in her presentation, first person perspective as the core game loop( hair braiding) and third person perspective to explain the protagonist’s emotion. We sat down and brainstormed our ideas with mindmap

Week 10

We had a group sharing again to pick up what we are doing now. Here is the feedback we received.

Games that suggested to look into: My Child Lebensborn, related to child abuse

Audience: It might come to different feelings of 13 y.o. and 25 y.o. when playing this game. One might still be struggling with a sad childhood and one might have experienced or has already overcome a sad childhood.

Consider making a 2.5 D game? As we mix digital art + physical elements