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Postmortem

Individual Postmortem

Overall, I think our team got along just fine. We all knew what to expect from this class and were ready to take the challenge. The first thing I felt we got right as a group this time was changing the program, we made changes to the game in. Instead of using Unity Collab which only allowed our coders to work in the scene. We were able to have everyone access the scene and make changes to the game without any trouble. Unlike the first project, we were able to give everyone enough tasks to keep them busy throughout the entire week. This project had more than enough tasks for our group to complete.  There weren’t as many problems with our project due to how organized our producer made sure to keep us with the tasks. The one issue I believe we could’ve addressed better was the notification when we had a new task. A lot of the tasks that were done in a group Excel document. This helped us stay organized and allowed us to see what our peers were working on. During one of the last weeks before art got implemented. The designers were given a small notice before the presentation that stated that all art must be implemented in the levels. I didn’t have a lot of experience with implementing new assets in a scene with Unity. It took me a little bit to figure out that the textures that were added were not for the jungle. In fact, a lot of my jungle assets didn’t get into my level because I don’t think they were ever made. I knew the HUB room was done but there were never any new assets for the Jungle level that were created. I was never given any news about my level getting any additional assets. Overall, I think the project went much better than our first one as a team. We struggled in the beginning but was able to make up more than enough time. Our producer managed to keep everyone on task and was able to guide everyone down the right path.

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Blog Post

During Month 7 of my time at Full Sail, I learned about asset creation and just how fast I had to push them out during the time crunch. There was a lot of times where I wanted to implement a few things into the project we created, but the time kept me from implementing assets. The class itself taught us about how having a plan can help teams come up with very strong ideas. Throughout the creation of our team’s game The Great Esqueek, I found myself trying to figure out how best to communicate with our teammates. I’ve never had a chance to work with everyone in my class before, so the experience to do so was quite an interesting one. Our group had so many artists that some tasks had to be cut despite being worked on. There were a few assets I had started to work on, but before I could finish an asset. Someone had already fully implemented it and it was already in the game. This reminded me of how studios work out in the industry. I’ve heard many horror stories of people spending hours making an asset only to have it scrapped due to unforeseen reasons. I was glad I was able to experience this to some extent. At least I now know how it feels before I get well into the industry. I had a lot of fun testing the different puzzles we had in our game out in the classroom. The Quality Assurance process for me was very interesting. I was able to use my brothers as my testers. Since our audience was much younger it made it quite harder to keep them entertained. They spent a lot of time just playing around with the simple mechanics of our game. It’s hard not wanting to guide them as a developer and give them all the answers.

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Mastery Journal Assignment

During my time in MEX, I’ve learned how important game testing is and even how destructive it can be if done improperly. I wasn’t surprised when I heard that good designers test after every implementation. I focused on the design when I wrote my Mastery Journal Paper assignment, and this course reinforced good design through testing. It also taught me that not everything you do in the lab will result in a perfect test. There are always validity threats out there. There was one team which threw out data that was unrelated to their study. Pr. Kennedy taught us that this act could be considered a validity threat. It was very useful to learn about something that could cost an entire study. I was strongly interested in learning about the process of recruiting for different tests and how the recruits can also influence test results. I also feel that it’s important that I understand everything that goes into the design process before I try to write a paper on how to better it. I’m investigating the usage of micro-transactions in games in hopes of providing designers a better solution or a correct way to implement them. The knowledge I learned from MEX helped me understand how to perform as successful test while also accounting for human factors during those test. Those human factors can help the test or potentially harm the results.

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Mastery Journal Threaded Research

The area my research falls is the consumer knowledge category. What I mean by this is that I believe that consumers should be aware of how much effort goes into producing content for a game. As a player, I understand how frustrating the concept of micro transactions can be, but I want my research to help players understand this from the industry’s perspective. If players can even have a small understanding why the usage of micro transactions is needed, then maybe they’d be more willing to support their favorite companies. The research I’ve done so far has looked at the various cases of how micro transactions are fair vs unfair. During month 4, I wanted to focus on investigating more tests that have been done to prove that micro transactions were needed to support making large games. I want to show players that no company in the industry is plotting against them. I also want to inform players about micro transactions that are considered greedy and which ones aren’t. My goal as a designer is to create games that players gain a unique experience from. I’ve always wanted to design games for teaching others about the world around them. Due to how dull text books can be. I think players will learn more if the subjects their learning interacted with them. I feel at the serious games track that I can create games that players will have a fun experience and learn about the games they’re playing. If I can design a game where players aren’t worried so much about how much money they’ve already invested but wish to learn more about the subject. I feel then that I’ve accomplished my goal. As a creative director I want my players to feel like their wallets matter. I don’t want to go the route of throwing thousands of cosmetic items at them without them already having quite a large assortment to choose from. I want players to see my company as one where they don’t have to worry about us being against them. I want to unite both designers and players.

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Mastery Journal Post

After completing month 3 at Full Sail. I learned quite a lot about the different functions behind project planning. My end goal in the video game industry is to reach the level of Creative Director in a company. In the creative director position I must have knowledge of good management skills if I want to survive in the job. In Project and Team Management, I learned the core behind any good project requires an amazing team. Professor Fredrick taught me about the different types of teams in the industry and how they together to complete a project. I also was intrigued to learn about how different teams can benefit from the style of leadership that is used to guide them. Using what I learned about project planning. I was able to come up with a plan for a future project. I intend to use everything I’ve learned in project and team management in the future by organizing those that will work under me in the future. I now understand all of the hard work behind planning an industry level project. Before taking this course, I’ve always started game projects with improper planning. The teams I’ve worked on used a Kanban style of management This meant that we chose to do a sticky note approach. We learned the hard way when our game went through a drastic change. After the change we had to scrap a lot of art assets due to improper planning. However, when we were lectured about the waterfall method of planning. Everything that I learned in my undergraduate degree began to make a little more sense. Overall this course provided me with great insight with how a project should be planned and maintained. I hope to use everything I’ve learned in this course in the near future.

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Mastery Journal Blog

Throughout all the team projects I have worked on the past, none of them focused this extremely on the process of team building this much. Prior to this course I was never taught how a team should deal with problems they may face as a team. In my undergraduate years, our teams followed a pattern of always choosing what was best for everyone. However, in this course I learned that every choice that we do as a group have different outcomes. During Research in Team Dynamics, I learned everything that teams experience while being in a part of a project. We were tasked with building a game in one month. Which may seem impossible at first, but the key feature was not what we completed. This month gave us an outside view of how teams formulate and act during certain crunch-times. In the future, I realize that I’ll be apart of many teams and having knowledge of the fundamentals would help immensely. This course also analyzed the very basic structure about running a team, and the different types of leaderships. We were shown what works in teams, and what creates tension. Overall, I learned that teamwork plays a very large part in the process of creating video games. Any job that I’ll be working on in the future will require some form of teamwork. Now that I understand the background of how a team works, I’ll be able to create strong teams and better products for consumers.

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Visual Representation Original Image: (2018, July 18). In Batman Arkham CIty. Retrieved July 28th, 2018 from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568322/mediaviewer/rm3422557184

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Course 12: Production Research Capstone https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses

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Course 11: Game Project Practicum https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses

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Course 10: Game Usability and Testing https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses

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Course 9: Asset Management https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses

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Course 8: Quality Assurance https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses

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Course 7: Prototyping and Content Creation

https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses

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Course 6: Game Production Tools (Full Sail, 2018 https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses)

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Course 5: Methods and The User Experience (Full Sail, 2018 https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses)

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Course 4: Game Design (Full Sail, 2018 https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses)

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Course 3: Project and Team Management

(Full Sail, 2018 https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-master/courses)