Our team was given an opportunity to present an early draft of the pitch to the wider group, and hear feedback from industry professionals. Therefore, week six of the module was focused almost entirely on formulating and reflecting on our team’s pitch.
Detailed log of events
(04/07/2021)
My work on the Game Overview part of the slides is made significantly easier by Elliot’s existing contributions to designing the character and story. I could use that information to introduce the protagonist and summarise the arc of the game.
I want to make sure that the slides are not busy and only serve to support my speech.
Also, I had a chance to review Paul’s furnished rooms the day before, and agreed with the suggestion that the rooms can be scaled down, basing this on the knowledge acquired last week.
(05/07/2021)
Paul presented a draft version of persona sheets, which he planned to use during the pitch. Since I had some experience in graphic design, I offered some advice on our Discord chat. By reducing the variance in font sizes and colour, increasing the amount of whitespace, and aligning elements with a grid, we managed to make Paul’s persona sheets look more professional.
To begin work on a high level sound design document, I began with some research:
- The LinkedIn Learning course Audio Design for Interactive Projects (which I first found at the start of the 720 module) offered an example project flow: starting from a project concept and creative brief, moving onto the creation of a sonic mood board, and finally running a few iterative cycles of producing sounds, presenting them to the client, and implementing feedback (Mars 2017). I found this to be a useful breakdown and intend to replicate this workflow, beginning with a short brief that will contain an asset list.
- I’ve also read parts of Game Sound by Karen Collins (2008); however the author seemed to mostly collect and classify historical examples of the use of music and sound in games, and I was hoping for more theory and analysis (furthermore, the gaming landscape has changed substantially since 2008 when the book was published).
(06/07/2021)
Our team met for a practice pitch. We had a number of technical issues that interrupted our call. We also noticed that the first round of practice pitches delivered by other teams suffered from technical interruptions as well. This convinced us that we should prepare our practice pitch as a pre-recorded video.
To assist, both Matt and myself offered to edit the video after all team members contributed footage. I ended up handling this as I had some extra time during the day, and my experience as a video editor meant I had a very quick turnover.
After a first round of internal feedback, there are a few changes I need to make. There is too much overlap between my mention of similar games and Paul’s section, so I am dropping that comparison from my part. Instead, I include a statement about the game’s overt theme of mystery versus the subtext of dementia.
(07/07/2021)
I continued research on the sound design task:
- I finished the previously mentioned LinkedIn Learning course.
- I searched Schell’s Book of Lenses for pointers that would be useful for this activity. The book does not dedicate separate sections to sound design, treating the subject holistically as part of the game’s aesthetics. However, a few lenses were worth singling out:
- The Lens of Accessibility – caught my eye because accessibility is the theme we started with; this lens encourages examination into whether a new player receives enough information to be able to play (and enjoy) the game – through visuals as well as sound (Schell 2019 : 257).
- The Lens of Atmosphere – our team wants to create a mystery game. How do we convey an atmosphere of mystery, using visual and audible content, rather than words (Schell 2019 : 431)?
- The Lens of the Team – a reminder that we all have a part to play (Schell 2019 : 469).
- The section on documentation also included examples of game design documents – although not specifically sound documents.
Game documents have exactly two purposes: memory and communication. (Schell 2019 : 472)
If a document created by our team does not serve either purpose, it is probably a waste of time and resources.
(08/07/2021)
- Finished editing our team’s practice pitch video, and iterated on it twice prior to the meeting start.
- Our team is very content with the feedback we’ve received from industry professionals. The feedback is thoroughly documented on Confluence. I think the key takeaway is that our game concept is solid, and we will need to focus on creating a presentation that will show it in the best way.
- The fact that the “reveal” of the game – the protagonist having dementia – only happens at the end of the game, is something that we can discuss sooner as it pertains to the design of the game itself.
- We may also want to make sure that there is enough in the game to separate it from a “dementia simulator” as we intended.
- Due to time constraints, we decided to move the sprint review/retrospective/planning until the next day.
(09/07/2021)
We hold our sprint review and retrospective. I drive the meeting, and it is my turn to take notes on Confluence as well (I managed to do both though in retrospect I should have asked someone else).
I proposed that, since this week’s challenge activity relies on us completing a SWOT analysis of our team, we spend our retrospective by following the format of the SWOT exercise.
I’m glad with how on board out team is with using Jira to track tasks. Especially our third sprint planning seemed to move on frictionlessly. The upcoming sprint will need to focus on the team charter and collecting performance metrics. I proposed an approach in which the draft and revisions are handled by a single person, with asynchronous feedback received from the rest of the team. This should help us use our time more effectively.
References
COLLINS, Karen. 2008. Game Sound : An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press.
MARS, Nate. 2017. “Audio Design for Interactive Projects Online Class.” LinkedIn [online]. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/audio-design-for-interactive-projects/ [accessed 10 Jul 2021].
SCHELL, Jesse. 2019. The Art of Game Design : A Book of Lenses. Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis.
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