End of semester studio reflection

A.K.A. - what should have been in my presentation only I lack public speaking skills hence it was omitted.

So the first semester is over. It's interesting to see where we are at the moment and what's become of our group. It's odd for me to say but I feel the biggest challenge of the semester for me has been working within a group. This is not because our group doesn't get along; we've been working quite well together and all have a similar understanding of our objectives. The challenge for me has mostly come from having my game design ideas rejected by the other members and struggling to find a way to present them as viable. I imagine the group as a big four headed beast, wrestling in 4 directions whilst I'm trying to wrangle it through 1 door; we all have varying ideas, targets, or concepts of "what's best" yet we only have one deliverable to produce at the end. Struggles aside, I am very satisfied with what we've produced for semester 1 though I still feel it could have gone better.

Having the title of "Lead Graphic Designer" has meant that I've spent most of this semester working on the graphic look of the game and I'm honestly quite happy with the minimalist look we have now. The irony being that the graphic look is little different from the rudimentary graphic engine that comes with Box2D, meaning a lot of development time went into producing little effect. It has been valuable for us to limit the scope of the game design, particularly the graphic design area, allowing more focus to be put on game design. If I may use my favourite game design example: Mario. "Super Mario Bros." was made 25 years ago, with limited 8 bit graphics, very few enemies, very few power ups, and tiny memory restrictions, yet it's a testament to the developer's game design skills (those of the great Miyamoto) that the game is still renowned today despite its restrictions. Limiting our project in much the same way to a @D game with minimalist visuals, linear level design, without narrative has been a positive allowing us to really focus on executing the core gameplay concept. Being able to now take the focus away from developing graphics I am especially looking forward to spending more of semester 2 working on the actual game design as it is my preferred area of interest.

I'm a little bit surprised by the work of our lead game designer. While he has contributed a lot of good ideas (eg: the player object's shape and function) and done a lot of level design work that we've used in the prototype, I don't feel he's done much of what I would expect from him as the lead designer in order to further the game concept from its initial idea; it has in fact evolved little from what I had originally designed prior to the semester beginning. That said, it has been great to see the concept I had at the beginning of the year become a reality, to the point that it has received a lot of positive feedback; I'm very impressed by the work we've all done individually and as a team, nothing could be more gratifying than seeing what we've produced and the effect it has on people. My main worry now however is that semester 2 is going to be a frustrating struggle to marry together varying visions of what the game should be into one final product.

One such example of this kind of struggle is the recent design idea I had, inspired by Derrick's demonstration of the indie game "Hello Worlds" ( http://www.kongregate.com/games/richwsnider/hello-worlds ), to replace the front-end menu of our game with an interactive overworld using the game engine. I will explain the idea in greater detail in my next post, only now to say that no one in the team really saw the value of the idea; I owe Matt thanks for championing the idea for me; it is now my duty to implement it so I can convince the rest of the team. Perhaps it is merely my lack of credentials, a failure to be taken seriously, or my design ideas aren't as great as I imagine them to be, or maybe I just don't belong in a group environment...