Weekly Relfections

Week 1

Not much, just refreshed the importance of mindmaps & planning

Week 2

Learnt of the significance of metaphors and poetic narritive/writing in video games. Symbolism can greatly enhance media.

Played some game poems and their ability to reach into the audience/players with clever symbolism and/or wording is significant and useful for future consideration.

Unfortunately I was unable to complete my Bitsy group project as I had fallen ill. I tried to incorporate metaphors such as one where the map funnels/bottlenecks the player towards a direction, symbolising the helplessness one may experience, wherein one has no autonomy or free will, and must comply with the situation. The end of the map is made more clautrophobic to envoke negative associations.

Week 3

This week, I learnt that to make a game, one must have a clearly defined intention. I want players to understand the necessity of confrontation despite the many fears one may have of it.

I myself have never been very confrontational, so it hurts me when I have to clash & conflict with others, especially when it’s necessary. The fear, helplessness & dread I had experienced in the past due to confrontation and subsequent rejection are reflected here.

Week 4

Learnt about how level design works and the procedure recommended. Blockmeshing seems extremely useful for planning out levels and how they should flow. Constructing flow charts also seems really helpful for making things more manegeable.

For the week’s tech session with Ross, I made a graybox map for an FPS game in Unity. I tried to make it extremely verticle, with many spots to hide and take cover in. I also tried to make it more fun by adding tunnels and bridges for players to traverse.

Week 5

Learnt about how narritive and gameplay complement one another, specifically how to structure them into readable & manageable forms.

Also learnt which parts of the story are most important, that being dramatic elements & connecting of elements into a cohesive narritive.

Week 6

Learnt a lot more about Game Pillars and Game Loops, including separation of Core and Meta Game Loops. The structures suggested this lesson, again, seem really useful in aiding with readability and manageability for my GDD.

The Thursday section about item systems makes sense, but for now I don’t really grasp it well, nor will I really utilise it for this current GDD I’m making. Similarly, Meta Game Loops make sense and i know it’ll be useful in the future, but for this GDD, I don’t see myself utilising it much.

I wrote this down as part of the lesson’s activities but i misjudged/misheard what was asked of us. It was about Items, yet I wrote far too much. Just throught to include this here…

Week 7

This week we had Formative Feedback. My tutor aided me by helping me put a cohesive idea & goals, although in the end I was unable to complete these goals.

Week 8

This week we learned about how to improve character design with techniques like colour psychology, shape theory etc. Learnt that visual pillars are an important part too.

Week 9

Learnt a bunch about user interfaces in games.

Also learnt about how audio works with & functions in games. The categorisations of audio types is really helpful, like how it categorises the types of audio for non linear media (games). Specifically I wan my game to have an adaptive soundtrack for each ’emotion”

Week 10

Learnt about how to make my GDD better.

We also did an activity where we presented our game through diagrams and descriptions, and the partner tries to summarise the game through our presentaion.

Upper text:

• exploration of confrontation and rejection and self reflection
• ? visuals based to represent internal thoughts
• two characters may love each other family or not, but there’s conflict, main character has to resolve it by walking through forest for self reflection, visually representing what mental discovery they have by finding items and locations
• when character returns from walk they confront other again and resolve their conflict

Lower Text is much clearer

They were able to describe my idea in alternate ways, such as having the characters reconcile, i never thought of that verb to describe my game’s ending.

Week 11

I wasn’t there…