After what felt like a long (well earned) break after completing Module 1, I was really looking forward to kicking off this week’s activities and challenges for Module 2: Game Development.
The aim of this module is to focus on the core design skills and disciplines within game development by covering different specialisms each week. By the end of the module we will also have to designed and built a single-player digital game prototype – which should include; gameplay mechanics, narrative, artwork, animation, level design and sound. Once completed, the game is expected to be distributed for testing and feedback.
This week the focus is on skills auditing and the different roles and disciplines within games development. The first (spark) activity we were asked to consider the seven major disciplines within Games Design and score what we believe our own proficiency to be within these.
On further inspection, I’d like to think I’m solid with a good number of the disciplines with programming and sound design being my weakest overall – although I have a passable working knowledge of how to get things done (or know where to look otherwise). I’ve good a good grasp of game and level design, as I’ve helped playtest and develop tabletop games in the past.
Art is definitely my strongest skill – although I don’t use it as much as used to due to time constraints mostly – I would say that Art is the closest I have to “professional” level skills, but is probably still a way off where it should be.
So, taking into consideration the Dunning-Kruger effect (Dunning, 2014), I’ve scored myself out of ten for each discipline below. I’ve tried to be as honest and objective as possible, with 1 being very limited knowledge and 10 being a professional at the top of their ability.
Game design 4
Programming 3
Narrative design 3.5
Art 5
Animation 3.5
Level design 4
Sound design 3
The scores show that I’ve got a lot of room for development overall and maybe indicate that I’m somewhere between a ‘Generalist’ and if I’m being very generous a ‘T-shaped’ person (Yip, 2018) – with Art being my ‘expertise’. Ideally by the end of the module my skills will have improved enough to re-assess my expertise.
References:
Dunning, D. (2014) ‘We Are All Confident Idiots’ [online], Pacific Standard, updated 14 June 2017. Available at: https://psmag.com/social-justice/confident-idiots-92793 . [Accessed 29 January 2021].
Heuer, S. (2012) ’Building Square-Shaped Teams With T-Shaped People’ [online blog], Agile Sean, 30 April. Available at: https://agilesean.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/building-square-shaped-teams-with-t-shaped-people/ . [Accessed 29 January 2021].
Yip, J. (2018) ’Why T-Shaped People?’ [online], Medium, 24 March. Available at: https://medium.com/@jchyip/why-t-shaped-people-e8706198e437 . [Accessed 29 January 2021].
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