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Asset Managment Personal Reflection

Overall, this experience was harrowing. While I understand the logic behind making this process as uncomfortable and awkward as possible to better emulate an industry experience. I’m not entirely sure that this method is an effective strategy for an educational environment.  It demoralized the class and hampered the learning process during the lecture portion of class.  On the matter of the project, I felt that it could have gone smoother. There were members of the team that weren’t as dedicated to seeing it through. Similarly, we had members of the team that suffered from bouts of laziness and had to be cajoled into doing their assigned tasks.

The game itself was strong in concept with well scoped initial design. Cause and Effect’s gameplay was fun and engaging as initially designed, it just needed some aesthetic work and bug fixes.  We were informed that we didn’t have enough work to fill our capacity and so re-scoped the game adding features and systems to try and fill our capacity. This was a problem because although we had a great deal of theoretical capacity the effective capacity was harder to work out.  Because we had so few devs and so many designers we had a great deal of dependency problems when assigning tasks. This problem was further complicated because we had only one person working on QA. Further our EP was also our lead dev and in charge of our production pipeline this was a problem, it was too many hats for one man to wear.  

There were a number of things we could have done differently. We could have more effectively distributed roles and tasks amongst team members during the first week. We could have also could have developed more effective communication strategies. Further, we could have found better means of managing our many varied schedules. Finally, we could have considered maintaining our initial vision and not adding features. I feel that the changes were a waste of capacity hours and we produced several substandard features when we could have spent that time polishing the ones we had and implementing a star system to further the games replayability.  I enjoyed working on cause and effect. I liked the project. But I don’t feel that this experience was as fulfilling as it could have been. I think that we could have still gotten the experience the professor intended without compromising on an effective learning environment.  But as each class consisted of an hour and a half or more of being grilled about our game (a mentally and emotionally draining experience I assure you) there was little focus or energy left to expend on our lectures. I feel that the class would have been a more effective learning environment if it had been restructured, putting the lecture first and the presentation second. This change would make learning the lecture material easier and allowed for a greater integration of the required reading.  

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Asset Managment Postmortem

This month we continued to work on Cause and Effect.  At the outset of the project we initially re-scoped the game to add more features. We made this decision because we had been led to believe that we would not have the work necessary to fill our projected capacity.  Several of our group expressed the opinion that this was a serious mistake and that we should have stuck to our initial design. Another point that was clearly agreed upon; is that although many were happy to see the overall progress made with the game over the course of the month, the general leadership of the project as a whole, and the delegation of tasks could have been handled in a more effective manner.  Several members of the team felt that a key problem with the project was a lack of motivation and a general attitude of laziness.  A point of contention for the team was on the matter of communication.  Some of the team felt that communication was a point of strength during the course of the project. Others felt, that communication was a weakness and a general stumbling block throughout the course of the project.  The final recurring theme from the comments was the lack of clear direction for project requirements and course expectations.   When asked about the one thing they would change the most common answer among team members was leadership of the project.  Several members felt that the project leadership wasn’t as effective as it could have been and sometimes served to demoralize rather than motivate.  The second most common answer was the expansion of scope in week one. On this point, it was the unanimous opinion that the initial expansion of scope was a grievous error in judgement. The consensus was that we had a well scoped game initially and that we should have stuck to that design rather than cave to outside influences.  Team members were asked to rate their experience for this project on a scale of 1-10. The average rating was 6. The median rating was a 6. The most frequent response was a 6. The lowest response was a 1 and the highest was a 9.5.  The final point of inquiry for the team was on the matter of the biggest take away from the project.  The most frequent comment was something to the effect of stressing the importance of a well-developed production pipeline or establishing solid and effective lines of communications.   Overall, the team expressed a variety of opinions about the project ranging from satisfaction with the opportunity to work on a project with full creative control, to an extreme dissatisfaction with the structure of the project and the course as a whole. One thing that most members of the team expressed feeling, was that the project probably served as an effective reflection of an industry experience.  While the experience was useful for the sake of experience, it did make more conventional learning in the class difficult.  The lecture was useful, but seemed to be of secondary importance to the production experience. This made academic learning seem almost unimportant to the course overall.  

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Over the last month our team has worked on the 2-D puzzle solving game Cause & Effect. During this time, we split into several sub groups to tackle the numerous objectives needed to complete our prototypes for the design. One team was responsible for all of our dev (building and implementing the design in a playable format). Another, was in charge of generating our art assets (the various tools and backgrounds needed for the game). A third, was tasked with design concerns (mechanics, their functionality and level design). The final team, was tasked with incidentals and other needs (resource management, audio, text, presentations, research questions etc.).  Each of these teams and their respective members were charged with certain deliverables for each week. These teams worked toward the completion of those goals so that they could present a new prototype or build in class.

After review and reflection several recurring themes came up with regards to the major “take-away” of the overall prototyping experience.  First, was that having more people does not necessarily equate to being more capable of meeting our goals.  Although we had 14 team members for the project, we had only one dedicated game developer and two others with some ability to code. We also had too many designers with too little work to effectively utilize them. However, this allowed us to develop a large number of levels for the game and made designing the initial game mechanics significantly easier. Next, several members of the team expressed that the prototyping process helped them to realize the importance of testing to make sure the game is “fun” and remained that way throughout the development process. To build on that point, was the realization that it was important to try different things during the iterative process to so as to explore the game’s potential regardless of the original goal. Finally, there were a couple of team members who expressed the opinion that the focus of the class and its activities was less on actually prototyping and more on about creating a game under a certain time limit.  

When asked about the good elements of the project there were a variety of different answers generated to the question. Despite this variety, the general attitude regarding the project seemed to indicate that the team felt we “were successful in producing a series of working prototypes, had a good communication structure and utilized the wide range of skills within our team to the best of our ability to create and deliver a fun and engaging gameplay experience.”  

Which leaves the evaluation of the “bad” aspects of the project. This area had the widest range of opinions and so it is easier to speak generally about some of the broader observations than to expound on specifics.  Some members of the team felt that the things discussed in lecture conflicted with things from the reading or with things learned in previous classes.  Others felt that the team was simply too large for such a small project. One point that came up and was of particular importance, was the fact that a majority of the team was not comfortable working in Unity. Another observation suggested that we did not necessarily have problems with capacity (we had to make work to fill hours for much of the team) but rather with the fact that we were bottlenecked by a shortage of dev capable resources.

Overall, the general attitude of the team seemed to be that with a little more time and a slightly more defined set of guidelines and expectations, we would be able to turn this prototype into a functional game in month nine. Between now and then we would benefit from developing a more effective means of communication and organization while getting our devs to refine the problem areas of the project. Another general consensus seemed to be that we will need to decide which of the builds (physics or non-physics) that we have developed will be the games intended style going forward and work to get that build fully functional and polished so we can continue progressing.  

________________________________________________________________ The prototyping process was nothing like I expected. I had honestly expected that we were going to be working on first ensuring that our game’s mechanics functioned properly on paper. Then moving on to rendering them in engine. Before finally, iterating to ensure the mechanics in game produced a fun experience.  What I got was a frantic and frenetic rush toward an alpha build of a game none of us were entirely sure was playable.  To be honest, I really felt like I was involved in a month long game jam.  One of the key problems we had with the game was simply that we had too many people working on it at one time with too little structure and an inadequate dispersal of skill sets.  We had three artists, one dedicated game dev and three others who had some coding experience in Unity, while the rest of the team was made up of designers. 

Another critical issue we faced was that we had a very well designed initial concept which meant that much of the burden of design had been front loaded. As a result, there was little real design work to be done until we could get to designing levels in engine.  That also does not take the bottle neck we faced on development. We didn’t get full functionality out of the original build until its 3rd iteration, and never got all of the game play mechanics implemented into the physics based build.  As a result, our designers (who were forced to churn out levels to fill our capacity hours) were stuck building levels that either could not effectively be tested or were designed without all of the mechanics in mind. I feel like Prototyping might have been a misnomer for this course, Iterative Design or Game Iteration might have been a better title. This feeling is chiefly because the expectation seemed to be that at the end of the month we would have a mostly developed alpha build looking for polish and final tweaks at a later date.  

All of this is not to say that the month was only negative experiences. It was a good object lesson on the importance of a carefully laid out production plan. This month also showcased the necessity of well-balanced team structures to make the most of the capacity on a given project.  I learned how to build levels in Unity and work with Source Tree which up until this point, was something that I had never done before and at times actively avoided getting involved with.  I also learned quite a bit about finding and logging bugs in a build to ensure a solid game play experience for the end user.  So overall, I would say it was not a bad month. I did learn a great deal. It just was not the experience I was expecting to have and the divergence between expectation and reality was initially off putting and uncomfortable.  

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Month 5 - Methods of User Experience

This month in Methods of User Experience has been informative.  While the kind of research that the game industry does isn’t really the sort I’m interested in, learning about processes and procedures games being tested will be invaluable going forward.  My research efforts are less interested in the scientific realm and more focused on the field of the Humanities.  To that end, I worked with several of my peers to evaluate the rules set of a game still in development to determine how confusing it’s mechanics are. This experience taught me about several interesting tools that might be usable in my own future research projects, the use of group thinks and surveys may be useful when trying to interrogate player’s experiences with race in games although nothing is certain yet.

This month I had to do yet another article critique, and this month I chose to read an article titled: “Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance.” This article details the development of Elves as a trope in Fantasy Literature. Starting with Tolkien and the sources he drew inspiration from and progressing forward into Dungeons & Dragons then into fantasy video games. After establishing its foundation the article goes on to discuss the treatment of elves as a racial construct and discussed the treatment of them as a racial other to allow games to confront potentially problematic themes that would be controversial if human characters were the subject of them.  Overall, this month has been useful it has offered me insight into another facet of game design, several new tools for my own research and finally a useful resource for the development of my own research project.  

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Month Four - Design

This month for my Mastery Journal I’ve been tasked with researching a topic that I feel is important to the game industry.  I have chosen to use this initial inquiry as a spring board for a larger discussion of the topic of Race in gaming which I am hoping to tackle as the focus of my thesis. To this end I’m looking to interrogate the way we build race as a game play mechanic, how race is or isn’t utilized as a tool in the construction of narrative, how players experience race in games and how games convey race or racial identity among other topics.  This is broad area of research in that it impacts all facets of the industry from mechanical design and game play to player reception and academic discourse. It is the breadth of this influence that makes this topic so important and yet there isn’t nearly as much work being done with it as there should be. To that end, I’ve got a great deal of further reading to do.  

For this assignment I read two pieces the first was titled “Your Second Selves Player-Designed Avatars” by Kafi, Fields, and Cook. The second piece I read was titled “The Trap of Representation” by Tanner Higgan. The first article dealt with the sort of factors, behaviors and pressures that motivated the act of avatar customization in a virtual world called Whyville.   I initially thought that this article would deal more with the process of self-actualization through character creation, I was mistaken. However, it did present me with several useful bits of information about the way avatar aesthetics can convey status and proficiency with the digital environment and its rules. It also has encouraged me to consider looking into the psychological phenomena of Identity play in relation to Role Playing Games as a possible avenue of inquiry.  The second article dealt with the problematic way we, as both consumers and an industry, handle representation of minorities in games.  Higgan grounds his work in the work of digital critical race theorist Lisa Nakamura and begins his interrogation of the problematic nature of representation. He discusses the argument that appropriate race for a title (in the case of his article’s discussion the dragon age franchise) is dependent on setting and points out that setting is a choice made by designers.  Higgan discusses the fan perception of race in Dragon Age: Origins and talks about way race got handled in the second game (more skin tones) was simply a concession to consumers and rather than an actual shift in design logic.  This article touched upon several points of interest for me and has led me to consider a few new ideas about several points I’m already investigating.  Overall, this article was useful and eye opening as it pushed me to consider fan interaction with developers and how discussion on this topic needs to not only draw attention to the issue but also encourage a change in the design process to alleviate the problem.  

This topic is appropriate for my chose capstone (both research and design track) in that it helps me be more aware of the decision that must be made about the topic of race and racial representation or design in the industry. This provides me with a starting point to seek out other perspectives and ideas in line with this concept and begin to build a design philosophy. As for career impact, I want to design games, but I would also like to continue to be a critic and researcher I enjoy the academic pursuit that is research and argument and this topic has been and will continue to be a favorite of mine.  I would consider this month’s endeavor to be time well spent as it has yielded several new perspectives and ideas to work with alongside of several I’ve already been investigating.  

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Month Three - Team and Project Management

I’ve spent the last month taking a course titled “Project and Team Management.” During this time I have learned about the process of outlining a project’s milestones.  I learned about budgeting and taking into consideration the value of not only materials and services but also the cost of time spent in man hours.  This month also covered personality profiles utilizing both the Myers Briggs method and the DiSC method, along with effective communication strategies for various types of people.  All of that was useful information and will undoubtable help me in my future career in the entertainment industry, but the two most invaluable pieces of knowledge I have acquired in the last four weeks are: personality profiling based on behaviors and other context clues and the fact that the most effective work environments are one built on a foundation of mutual respect, trust and comradery.  

Teams that have been built to operate in such a work environment are more motivated to go above and beyond the norm in terms of effort and productivity.  Such teams tend to have higher levels of job satisfaction and tend to have fewer conflicts. But knowing this information doesn’t tell you how to go about building such a team.  The fact is that the process of building such a team requires building trust and establishing relationships.  Doing this quickly and effectively requires a team leader have some skill in reading people so that they can best determine how to communicate and interact with each individual member. While some people are naturally adept at reading others, some will need to develop and cultivate this skill.  For readers who want to see an example of this process you can go here to see a character study that I have done for you.  If you can master this skill and employ it in your own team building efforts you will cultivate a much more effective working environment.  I encourage each of you to explore my character study blog post and comment if you questions or disagree with my analysis and you wish to debate the matter.  

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Character Study - Morrigan

For this post I will be doing a character study of the Dragon Age character Morrigan to try and evaluate her personality traits and communications strategies that might be most effective in working with her.  Before we begin, you’re going to have to do a bit of reading to understand the system we are using to profile Morrigan, so please explore the materials locate here, here and here before continuing on.  Now that you’ve done that were going to watch a couple of clips, here, here and here so that we can do our evaluation of Morrigan.

As you have no doubt seen, Morrigan comes across as harsh and direct with a focus on personal freedom and a desire to be “right.”  She takes risks, but only calculated ones where she has seems to have a firm grasp of the expected results; like leaving the empress alone with her guards to speak to the Inquisitor. Her body language shows that she is supremely confident, in the first clip it’s also distancing, she speaks to the player from on high with her arms crossed. She speaks with elevated diction and in an almost formal and slightly ridged fashion, each word carefully considered and chosen for the greatest accuracy in meaning. She doesn’t use an excessive amount of hand gestures while speaking and doesn’t seem to initiate physical contact with others, in fact she seems to prefer distance even with those she considers to be friends and allies (as seen in the second clip). Morrigan has no difficulties making direct eye contact with the people she is speaking to, and doesn’t seem to go out of her way to avoid conflict, she might not start them but she will certainly finish them.  Overall, I would say that Morrigan probably has a high rating in Compliance and Dominance with low scores in Influence and Steadfast.

Knowing this, the question becomes: how best should we communicate with Morrigan?  She seems to respond best to directness with a veneer of polite propriety (probably to avoid familiarity and maintain a sense objective distance).  While trying to build a working relationship with Morrigan it would be important to understand that friendship is going to a far future goal not an immediate one.  She is a private and independent person, trying to push too far too fast is simply going to alienate her.  That being said, she is goal oriented and seems to have little tolerance with things she deems frivolous preferring a direct and immediate approach to problem solving.  When communicating with Morrigan utilize a direct and formal manner of speaking, maintain a professional distance and “prove” your worth with actions and expertise. In this case building rapport and trust is going to take time, expertise and consistency.  Should you accomplish that, she will be an absolutely invaluable asset to any team, provided her goals and the teams are not in conflict. 

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Transmedia Storytelling and Games

What do you think when you hear the term Transmeida? Let’s break that term down, “Trans” a prefix of Latinate origin that implies to go or be “across”, “beyond”, “through” etcetera. “Media” the plural from “medium” a “medium” is “an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished.” So Transmedia is an approach by which something is conveyed across or beyond a single medium.  Game worlds are becoming incredibly complex and the means of conveying them have become more diverse.  If we look at the recent release of Fall Out 4, The developers released the Pip-boy companion app to create a second screen game experience. Another recent franchise to take advantage of Transmedia is Bioware studios’ Dragon Age universe.  The world of Dragon Age exists not only in the three games at its core but also in a series of companion novels, an animated movie and a web series.  The fact is that the game industry is becoming more and more of a transmedia experience.  Fans of successful game narratives want more, more content, more explication, more lore, more of the worlds and stories they love.  That’s a good thing.  

So what drives transmedia storytelling? According to Henry Jenkins, and authority on the subject the answer is simple: Fans. Fans and fandom are the driving factor behind Transmedia storytelling.   Gallarino states that in his presentation on transmedia Jenkins contends that “Fans, immersed in a wide-ranging narrative universe, strive to produce their own transmedia extensions” (Gallarino, 2012). The examples he cites include the Lostpedia, fan performances of Glee songs and Star Wars uncut.  

     I’m sure at this point you’re thinking “yeah that’s all well and good, but how does this apply to gaming?”  The answer to that question is complex. Fans and Fandom are incredibly powerful forces in the entertainment industry. Forces that, like it or not, we have to pay attention to or run the risk of being crushed under their weight.  For people who design games and game worlds this is a complicated tight rope to walk; providing new content to expand a world in a new and enriching manner without invalidating things that came previously. In some cases it might be best to go about the design process with transmedia storytelling in mind.  Perhaps in leading up to the release of a game a studio could run an Alternate Reality Game, to build fan interest. Or perhaps in the lull between games a studio could develop a web comic that connects the two instalments in the series.  There are always companion novels to provide further exposition and backstory.  Any way you look at it awareness of Transmedia and the connection it builds between studios and their fans is going to become more and more critical as the industry continues to advance.  

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Month Two - Research in Team Dynamics

For the last month I have been taking a class titled “Research in Team Dynamics.” The best way to describe this course is probably as being: an odd combination of Psychology and Sociology.  Overall, this course has been strange. I’m not really one for putting any stock in Psychological concepts or perspectives and Sociology always seems like common sense.  However, I am required to take it and I wish to excel in my program so I have suspended my preconceptions and endeavored to make the best of this situation.  In this course we have discussed a number of concepts ranging from motivation and power dynamics, to problem solving and creativity.

One of the things that we had to work on for the duration of the course was a game project. We split the class into two teams and each team designed an initial concept and pitch for a game that we had to develop over the course of the month.  As my several of my classmates and I had already formed a team and worked on a game project prior to starting Research in Team Dynamics, we had a fair idea of what we were looking to do. Our team, The Unicorn Singularity, has seven members: an artist, an entrepreneur, an audio engineer, a game developer, a game designer, a marketer and myself as the writer.  We have a good distribution of skills that allows us to come at such projects from all of the necessary perspectives.  We had our initial game concept for “Get The Loot!” finished within three hours of our first class.  By the end of the second we had fully fleshed out the concept and were getting a better sense of the mechanics we wished to design and implement.   As we progressed through the second week of the project it became immediately apparent that our initial plan greatly exceeded the scope of our class and we set to paring down anything that we could to try and make the game a more workable idea.  

This project did a great deal to help me develop a better understanding of what working in a team is like. The other members of The Unicorn Singularity and I participated in a “game jam” at the end of October.  During this experience we spent forty-eight hours trying to develop a working game prototype.  We did ultimately succeed in building a fairly effective proof of concept. However, the pacing of that previous design experience was frantic and compressed. We worked in close quarters and under such demanding time constraints that we really had no idea of what working on a project under more normal circumstances would be like. It was a bit of adjustment to shift from our “game jam” mind set to one that was more tenable for our work on “Get The Loot!”

One thing that was different was the fact that we weren’t trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of every second that we had. This difference in attitude lead to a fair bit of getting off task and talking about things of a social nature rather than those with a project focus, this issue was quickly remedied when we realized that it was going to be a problem and we all took turns riding herd on the others. Another problem we had to figure out how to overcome was managing all of the schedules of our team members so that we could meet effectively. One of our members works and his job schedule is varied and another member of our team had a baby on the way and is now a father so we had to find a time or way to meet that worked for both of them as well as the rest of the group.  This need drove us to using digital meetings for any discussion we had to have that didn’t require close collaboration. Over the course of the month we had several skype meetings, and each was immensely successful.  

Overall, I think my Research in Team Dynamics course has offered me a great deal of perspective on how to approach teamwork situations.  As a person, I tend to be a loner and do my best work when left to my own devices.  The game industry doesn’t work that way. It’s inherently a group activity, working in teams is essential and unavoidable.  The experiences of the last month have helped me to develop an understanding of how to work with others and the skills to do so in an effective manner. I now have a better understanding of the different things that drive people on a task and the ways to improve a person’s motivation to not just do their job, but do it well.  I learned that while creating things with a group is inherently more difficult if it can be carried off successfully it seems to yield more consistent results.  Most importantly, I learned that sometimes you have to trust that others are capable of doing the job and importance letting go of control so that they can get it done right.  

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Mastery Timeline For Full Sail

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Logo 

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My Linkedin page

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/patrick-crosmun/107/5a7/502

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A Screen Shot of my Diigo page

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And So It Begins...

My name is Patrick Crosmun, I have my Bachelors of English and am now studying to acquire my Masters of Science in Game Design. I have come here to Winter Park, to attend Full Sail University for the next year.  This decision and the subsequent move constituted the first two steps of my quest towards attaining Mastery.  The third came when I met my fellow students in my group of GDMS here at Full Sail. By the end of that evening, they were more than just my classmates. They became my peers and more importantly my friends. For anyone who knows me, the fact that I choose to call these individuals my “friends” and “peers” is incredibly significant and incredibly telling of my respect for them. By the end of that week, we took the fourth step on the road to Mastery together: We chose to form a team, a team we call The Unicorn Singularity.  The Unicorn Singularity, has great plans to work on several game projects already.  My next step I plan to take on this path is participate in a “game jam” later this month alongside The Unicorn Singularity team. After that, things are a bit more nebulous. I know that I’m going to have to choose a capstone project in the next couple of months, although I have no idea which I’d like to pursue at this time.  Similarly, I also know that in the next year, networking is going to become an increasingly important activity and take a ever more prominent place in my life. Beyond that, well nothing is certain. I do, however, have goals that I’d like to strive towards.  I want to work for a studio that produces narratively significant games. I’d also like to pursue my English education to a PhD, with the hopes of eventually teaching at a university. Although, at this point the where and whens of such things have yet to come.  In the meantime, let’s take a walk, and see where this path goes.