Sprint 1 Reflection

Material

  • Week 1 Orientation
    • Getting to know each other
    • Setting out our goals for the module and our future
  • Week 2 Creativity
    • What is ‘creativity’?
    • Creative techniques
    • ICEDIP
  • Week 3 Prototyping
    • Reverse-engineering
    • Narrative prototyping

Personal Development

  • Twine – “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories” (Twine 2020).
  • Getting to know the September 2020 cohort

Reflect-in-action

Please see my blog posts for Sprint 1 for my reflection in-action.

Reflect-on-action

The months leading up to my MA in Indie Games Development were nerve-wracking, but starting with Week 1 Orientation eased me into the course. During our first week, I began to consider the research that I would like to undertake. 

After getting to know each other, we begin to look at creativity, ideation, and prototyping tasks. I consider myself a creative person and enjoyed the materials for weeks one to three. During ‘Week 2 Creativity’ we looked at several techniques for fueling creativity. SCAMPER, opposite thinking and sketching are techniques I tried out as part of the course. I enjoyed the Week 2 activities and found the feedback, discussion and insight into the cohorts creative practices inspiring and informative. Many activities were suggested by our cohort, including communication, conversation, and taking a walk!

Week 3 on Prototyping, has been positive, I learnt different theories and processes behind prototyping a narrative and built my own Frostpunk mini-game in TwineTwine is an incredibly popular tool for games designer’s and writers, and it’s been great fun researching interactive fiction and prototypes built by other creatives.

Reflect-for-action

The first week, everyone uploaded avatars of objects around their home that identified with who they were. Our cohort will be spending the next two years together, so it’s an apt opportunity to begin understanding each other.

Getting to know each other, our skillsets and begin collaborating will support preparation for ‘GDD730 Co-Creative Design & Development Practice’. The module aims to “cultivate ways of collaborating and managing creative projects effectively in a distributed multidisciplinary context” (Falmouth University 2020) will be supported by knowing where we might be able to help one another.

Formal activities for creativity and methods for prototyping are fantastic for finding inspiration, and I will undoubtedly use them again for both Rapid Ideation periods and the next module ‘IGD720 Game Development.’

Software skills like Twine will be desirable skills for games writing and design as well as prototyping.

References

Falmouth University. 2020. ‘Course documents’. Falmouth Flex [online]. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/905/pages/course-documents [accessed 27 October 2020].

Frostpunk. 2018. 11 Bit Studios, 11 Bit Studios Merge Games.

Frostpunk Wiki. Available at: https://frostpunk.gamepedia.com/Frostpunk_Wiki [accessed 14 Dec 2020].

Twine. 2020. ‘Twine / An Open-Source Tool for Telling Interactive, Nonlinear Stories’. twinery.org [online]. Available at: https://twinery.org/ [accessed 14 December 2020].