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Formative Assessment

I have always thought of myself as a creative thinker, my first instinct when coming up with new ideas is to jump straight in and make even if I have no real direction. These past few weeks have shown me that even with making, I should try and look at it from different or new perspectives to have a base to start with rather than struggling to figure out where to start. When I come to face a problem during the creation process of a game I see it as both a challenge and a path to a new direction. I'm always thinking of alternatives and new ideas as I am creating and I treat problems the same way so that I am able to have a range of solutions if my ideas don’t work out the way I had planned. 

 

Within Game Design there are a few key methods that get predominately used, one of them being prototyping which for me is the most important as it is what makes or breaks my game. Prototyping is one of the most important processes when it comes to making something within a game. It’s what enables me to find out what works and what doesn’t within a games environment and how it can be seen to the player when played. It also allows me to test a range of my ideas and bring any 2d or 3d assets that I have made into the world to see how they work. 

 

I find myself quite an independent designer, even in a group setting. In different ways, it works and doesn’t work as I am able to go off and produce all the work that is needed on my part but I am still learning how to communicate and be okay with people working at a different speed than I might. Previously during my time in undergrad I worked on two projects with a group, they both went well however I did find that I was putting stress and pressure on myself which wasn’t needed due to wanting to put out work that my group would be happy with as well as making sure it was done in a timely manner. The process of making something within a group is always a really different and new experience as everyone has their own creativity and thought process so there are always new and interesting ideas that are being brought forward that in turn make new projects.

The 5 words I chose are Silhouette, Decipher, Metamorphosis, Shadow and Mirror. I find that I am quite a creative thinker and I am always looking for inspiration for art or projects from anything that I can. When I chose my five words, this kind of mindset is what brought me to find words that when I read I can visualise ideas and things I could create with them. All the words I chose gave me a large inspiration to create and stimulated my creative senses.

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Figure 1. Mindmaps I created exploring the 5 words

When I first started exploring my five chosen words, I wanted to look at them in their most basic form so that I could really understand them and their definitions. My first thought was to start simple and look at their synonyms and similar words. I wanted to do this because even though similar words will have the same or similar meanings, they can hold more meanings. By breaking the main words into different words that held some differences, they could be broken down even further with their respective synonyms. I found this interesting as it opened the words up a lot from their starting point and created many new ideas that were all so different and held such different meanings. For instance, I broke up ‘Mirror’ and found a largely illustrative side to it, or how ‘Shadow’ broke down into different words that held a literal shadow meaning or something emotive and emotional. From here, I want to explore the different branches of these words further and start to create pieces of work that I can use to further my project idea. I will be looking at the word in the literal sense and looking at the words associated with the original world, and bringing them together to create a new sense of the world. 
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The methods I am using to explore the words are mainly conceptualizing them and prototyping. These two methods are essential when creating games and bringing ideas to life, so it was natural for me to use the same methods to explore my chosen words and see what I can create with them and incorporate them into my project.

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Figure 2. Idea Sketch dump for possible experiments

When exploring the words I chose I had a range of ideas that I wanted to test out, so I did some quick sketches just to get my ideas on paper. Shadow and Silhouette were the first words that I thought of ideas for. When it came to experimentation I felt starting off with making something that was quite literal would be a good starting point. I also had a thought to be able to merge metamorphosis and mirror together as both incorporate changes so that is where my ideas of switching between the 2D and 3D forms would be incorporated. As a designer who tends to jump straight in and create, planning out basic ideas in this form helped solidify what I had planned to develop and could see how I may incorporate it into my game. 

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Figure 3. My photoshop trial of objects switch between 2D and 3D

I focused on 'Mirror' and 'Metamorphosis' from the five words I had chosen in my first experimentation. Both terms, to me, reflected a change or switch between one form and another. Because the 2D and 3D forms are my research's main focus, I wanted to try creating an object switch between the two states. I created this animation in Photoshop as I tried to visualise it first in a simple way to help me understand what I am trying to produce and others who may view my work.  From my perspective, I found that my visualisation was successful as it placed my idea in more context and helped me explain to my peers and lecturer my thoughts and processes that I will be taking. I knew that I could then start to try my works within the games' space from this starting point. As this is a work and progress that will take me time to create due to the objects' modelling and the process that I will need to do to recreate them in a simple matter, I will be returning to this experiment and testing different possible perspectives. 

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I understand that this process will take the longest as it is the main focal point of my research, and it is not an easy task, but I am very interested in how I could replicate this within my game and what experiments I can create with this style. When doing this experiment, a few of my chosen words were always in the back of my mind. As I was still working on expanding my chosen words to create new meanings, I found that some extended to very illustrative definitions. These definitions influenced my ideas around experimentation for the sketching process and the aesthetics around how I will be creating the pieces within my game project and how I may push them to showcase m chosen words like 'Mirror'. 

Figure 4. Day to Night Cycle I created in Unreal Engine

When diving into my five chosen words and their meanings, I found that some of them remained pretty literal. Once starting to expand them, I was able to separate a literal meaning and a non-literal one. Some of my words like 'Shadow' and 'Silhouette' were very obvious with their literal meanings while also having a very emotive sense that would work very well within a narrative. These ideas are what I wanted to start exploring, including both an experiment on 'Shadow' in its proper form as well as analysing it within an interactive narrative context. I started with the sketches of how a day to night cycle may perform and how in a typical day, one may view the shadows cast by the light within their space. Using my sketches, I then went ahead and tested out a day to night cycle within Unreal Engine,[1] a simple process that I found challenging due to the unknown software. When creating the day to night cycle, I imagined it within a larger context. We tend not to notice the little things during our lives, such as how the light changes throughout the day and the procedural shift of the shadows; this is the feeling I wanted to replicate back into my project. The shadow experimentation, while literal, would be in the background as something that you would only notice if you paid attention to it. I thought this would be an excellent way to experiment with the ideas around shadow and mirror in the way I chose to replicate similar day-to-day things in a small way. 

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Figure 4. Street walk cycle created with Maya

It was a challenge to create artefacts based on 'silhouette' without them coming off as very obvious. I thought of a few ways to combat this, and one way I thought of was including it as a small element within the total project. Already I have ways to include silhouette through the use of 2D within the game space as it has connotations around line and shape or outline, so I wanted to experiment with something different. As I include a heavy focus on interactive narrative within my project and research, I wanted to test how I could incorporate my five chosen words. In this case, it was the word silhouette, and I thought to add it into a more interactive space or a cutscene. Andersen explores the use of interactive narrative within their Master thesis "The Ark Project: an investigation into interactive environmental narrative". [2] They explore narrative in an environmental, interactive and explorable way which is the general idea of what I wish to create. Using Maya,[3] a modelling and animation software, I built a test street-walk cycle that placed the character walking down the centre, passing by the silhouette figures. Unfortunately, my ideas hadn't translated as I was hoping they would since I had not used the software in a while, and my experience with it this time was relatively slow. As I continue to delve into my chosen words, this experiment is something that I would like to incorporate better into my project. I want to utilise the idea I have come up with and aid my findings into how 2D and 3D can work together in a single space. 

Exploring and experimenting over these past few weeks has brought me successes, failures and new perspectives. After presenting my ideas, I understand that I have a solid project that I would like to research and create. However, I do need to experiment and trial more so I can solidify the processes that I will be taking and broaden my ideas that I can bring to my research. My original idea was to use Unreal Engine as my game creation software, it was something I had yet to use, and I was eager to learn and find how I can utilise it in my research. The exploration process became quite difficult when I realised how much I had to learn with Unreal to experiment and create artefacts, even if the creation was relatively simple. After this realisation, I knew it would be best to switch back to a software that I knew, Unity.[4] Rather than putting myself under the pressure of learning entirely new software and learning how to build my ideas, I wanted to go back to what was familiar to focus on my research ideas and put more effort into it without the additional strain. As I will be now working with software that I understand, I will bring the current experiments I have created and place them in the context, in this instance, the game space, that I had intended. This way I can work on further experiments and see if what I have tested will work with the project to help me further my research. 

  1. The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games 

  2. Chris, Andersen. "The Ark Project: an investigation into interactive environmental narrative" (Master's Thesis, Auckland University of Technology, 2011), Page 11-44, http://hdl.handle.net/10292/4402

  3. Maya is 3D visual effects software with powerful character creation, rigging, animation and simulation tools.

  4. Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies

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