This week, I presented the results of our final rapid ideation session with Will Ward. I also studied concepts related to communities of practice – groups that meet and engage in knowledge and experience sharing based around a common topic or problem (Pyrko, Dörfler and Eden 2016: 389-409). I reflect on my experience with both. I also took part in a short study session with fellow students.
Reaching out to other practitioners
The weekly material outlined the characteristics of several communities that could be of interest to our cohort – such as the Maker Movement, the Open Source community, the hacker community, and the Agile community. Participation in a community of practitioners would be an integral part of our development, and was heavily encouraged (Parker 2020).
To an extent, I have interacted with members of each of those communities in the past – usually to seek help with a particular issue. For example, in my time at the University of Dundee, I spoke to makers to seek advice and used their equipment such as wood cutters and laser cutters to develop projects for my course. On the other side, I’ve occasionally provided advice on forums related to video editing, to other aspiring editors. Although I do not feel that I have ever been closely aligned with any particular community, I do drop in and out of forums and discussion spaces when I am faced with a challenge.
I feel that due to my varied interests and sometimes limited time, I do not commit more time to “submerging” myself in any single community of practitioners. Perhaps participation in a long-term project, such as the final project of this course, might prove more conductive to a longer dive into one of those communities.
Weekly challenge
For the week’s challenge – producing an informal report about a community of practitioners – I discovered a group based on a Discord server called the Game Dev League. Based on what I discovered, it seems that it would be worthwhile for me to join and listen in on the conversations around game development, especially hearing the perspective of numerous other Unity developers active on the server (Game Dev League 2015).
In terms of the writing activity itself, I was quite happy that the exercise was time-boxed to an hour – I’ve spend approximately 30 minutes researching and 30 minutes writing.
Perhaps what I usually find daunting in writing a long piece is the prospect of spending an unspecified (long) amount of time constructing and editing, which often seems to take longer than expected. When that idea was “reversed”, and I tried to finish the exercise within an hour, I approached the task in higher spirits.
Finished rapid ideation
The week marked the finish of the two-week rapid ideation session.
Time spent on each task was tracked on a Kanban board. When visualised on a treemap (below), one can see that I had spent more than three quarters of total (35¼ hours) time on development.
In comparison, during the first rapid ideation session: the idea generation, prototyping and learning activities had taken half of all the project time. At the time I saw it as time spent well; in fact an extended period of theoretical study might have been necessary for my first Unity project, having no prior experience. As as result of gaining some familiarity with the tools over the first session, I was able to ingest theoretical knowledge during the second session more effectively, and as a result – I was able to spend more time on development.
The feedback I received from the rest of the cohort has been positive – especially the atmosphere of the game was praised. While much this can be attributed to the ambience sound we used, as well as Will’s art – it has been noted that the use of lighting in the scene has had an effect (Falmouth University 2020).
Lighting did cause me some trouble during the jam. For example, in the current build, there are lighting artefacts visible where lit wall tiles overlap each other. The overlap was inevitable as the tiles generated from our graphics did not adhere to a grid perfectly. Due to the standard rendering process, overlapping areas would light up excessively (michalsrb and bgolus 2016).
To resolve issues like this, and gain access to greater flexibility with defining the behaviour of lights in Unity, I may look into using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) package. Although I didn’t use it at first to keep project complexity low, it would allow to define the behaviour of Alpha Blend on Overlap for lights, which likely would have fixed the problem (Unity Technologies 2019). I should look into the URP documentation for future projects.
Note on presentation
When reviewing the recording of our weekly webinar (Falmouth University 2020), I had a chance to hear myself present the game to the rest of the cohort. I noticed that the pacing of my speech was uneven and that I had a tendency to speed up mid-sentence and slur slightly. I also took note of my frequent use of filled pauses (the ‘umm‘s).
I will try to be more aware of those behaviours, especially considering that one of my upcoming deliverables is a 5 minute video in which I will be expected to speak. When working on it, I will make sure to practice and re-record until I am satisfied.
Study session
Since work on the rapid ideation session took priority over my other tasks for the module, I now had to catch up on fleshing out a number of entries in my blog.
Josh, a UX design student, proposed a study session one evening. With a number of other students we joined a video chat. We shared what we were hoping to work on, and set a certain amount of time to focus on our tasks. Afterwards we would share our progress. The idea was that feeling the presence of others and hearing them type would have a motivating effect.
During our call, we shared our feelings about common problems. For example, it was common to experience a sense of burnout when moving from our last ideation sessions back to focusing on theory and the creative reflection journal. I was glad to hear that I was not the only person feeling that way.
In any case, this experiment got me writing for an hour longer than I planned to that evening. It would be worth repeating if we find ourselves having to focus in the following weeks as deadlines approach.
References
FALMOUTH UNIVERSITY. 2020. “Weekly Webinar: Week 9 – 18th November 7pm UK Time.” recordings.reu1.blindsidenetworks.com [online]. Available at: https://recordings.reu1.blindsidenetworks.com/falmouth/d1d43c38ce52a3552f77c343f24393ebda4461dd-1605725866078/capture/ [accessed 25 Nov 2020].
GAME DEV LEAGUE. 2015. “Join the Game Dev League Discord Server!” Discord [online]. Available at: https://discord.com/invite/gamedev [accessed 25 Nov 2020].
MICHALSRB and BGOLUS. 2016. “Sprites/Diffuse on the Same Sorting Layer Additively Blended Together, a Bug?” Unity Forum [online]. Available at: https://forum.unity.com/threads/sprites-diffuse-on-the-same-sorting-layer-additively-blended-together-a-bug.433065/ [accessed 25 Nov 2020].
PARKER, Alcwyn. 2020. “Communities of Practice.” Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/872/pages/week-9-researching-communities-of-practice?module_item_id=46499 [accessed 25 Nov 2020].
PYRKO, Igor, Viktor DÖRFLER and Colin EDEN. 2016. “Thinking Together: What Makes Communities of Practice Work?” Human Relations 70(4), 389–409.
UNITY TECHNOLOGIES. 2019. “2D Lights Properties | Package Manager UI Website.” docs.unity3d.com [online]. Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@7.0/manual/2DLightProperties.html#alpha-blend-on-overlap [accessed 25 Nov 2020].
Image
SPRATT, Annie. 2018. Unsplash.com. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/QckxruozjRg [accessed 9 Dec 2020].
inverted ↄontrols 