Game Production II Blog Post 1

I was really happy with the sprint this week, and our team. I really like one of the ideas we came up with, and I think that it has excellent potential to both be fun, as well as to iterate on it. With the MangaRace game idea, we have a simple solid base for a game, and we already have so many other ideas on how to add new mechanics to make it even better. It’ll also be really easy to get the base game done, then to add the new mechanics one-by-one each sprint. I actually hope we get our team back together to end up making it. Our other ideas were pretty solid too. The Excel game was an interesting idea, and I feel like we could do a lot of different things with that concept, too. It’ll also be easier on our artist, so that would be nice too. Our programmer seems to think that it won’t be hard to network that game specifically, so that is also a benefit of that game. The final game idea I really like in concept, but I don’t really want to make a game about minigames. I like the idea of the game starting out as an innocent butler doing normal tasks that overtime get stranger until they eventually learn that they are working for a necromancer, and end up doing really messed-up things like sweeping up body parts for them.

As a developer, I feel like I am doing alright. I feel like my designs and documents are pretty solid, but I could definitely improve in other areas. I’m a bit rusty on my programming skills, so hopefully I can get back into the swing of things in Game Systems and Experience Design. One thing I also felt like I didn’t do as good on in previous projects was supporting my team, especially my programmers. I want to work on helping out my programmers more, since I can do basic scripting. I mostly left the programming to them in the past, and I feel guilty that I didn’t really make an effort to help out, even when I was already done with most of my work. I’d also like to work on my level design skills, especially in 3D games, since I don’t have much experience with that. The MagnaRace idea would be a decent opportunity to look into level designs for racing games, which isn’t even something I had thought about before, but is actually probably still good experience. I also know I could improve my communication with the team. It’s not bad, in fact I think I did a decent job, but I know that I will always be able to improve that, so I think it’s always worth mentioning. Actually, something I really want to work on is giving better critique. I’ve gone over it three times now with my professor in different classes, but I still don’t think I’m very good at it. And it’s so important to be able to get my ideas across. I just want to be able to give useful information. I feel like all I can say sometimes is “I like it” or “I don’t like it,” but then not explain why. I need to spend more time practicing that, which I hopefully will be able to in all of my design classes. I also need to get away from the style of VDD that I’ve been doing. I make the same basic outline for every game I make, and I think that a lot of the other designer’s VDDs look a lot better than mine. I think I get the info and mechanics across well enough, but it still doesn’t look very good, at least in my opinion.

Something else I need to get better at is writing blog posts. I don’t really know what I’m doing with this, but I do think it’s a good idea to write my thoughts down. I also don’t really know how to end a blog post, so I guess I’ll just end it here?