Week 2 was all about the rapid ideation of our artefact following on from the formation of the team. We started by selecting a name for out team and finally voted for "The Wild Branch" following discussions and brain dumping on the team Discord channel.
This was a great low-stakes activity to get everyone discussing ideas and connecting with each other as well.
Following on from this worked on the week's challenge activity - which was to create and share a rapid ideation plan. It was important that this was completed quickly, as it would allow for smoother transition for group working by setting up some good practice frameworks and consistent communication methods. This would also be beneficial when working on the team charter later on in the project.
To do this, discussed and voted for the topic of sustainability to base our project around and then had an in-depth meeting (with those that were able to attend) over Google Meet about what the document would need to look like and listed our skills and preferred areas to work within the team - those that couldn't attend were asked for their suggestions and feedback later on. The group came up with the following:
Team Composition (amended): The team composition was made up of areas of focus - ideally suited to everyone's individual skills and knowledge with core team member(s) and support as needed.
File storage / Version Control - we discussed this with each other and decided to use Github as most of us had previous experience with this and would make things more straight forward with the general development.
Communication Strategy - Discord was chosen for the majority of our communications, as again most of the group had already used it and it also allowed for fluid regular communication despite the varying time zones and also had inbuilt audio and video call functions (if needed). We would also use Teams and Google Meet for our regular conference calls.
Agile Methodologies - We used an integrated Trello Kanban board and Discord channel
Group Schedule - We discussed our availability and came up with a group schedule that allowed us to have a weekly group meeting every Wednesday at 12:00 noon BST and a supervisory meeting with our group supervisor every Monday at 18:00 BST.
Tools and techniques - We used Miro boards as our main way of planning and collating ideas. As well as the following ideation techniques:
Alongside this, we began our actual ideating for the project by discussing and analysing ideation techniques using 'The Complete List of Ideation Techniques for Remote Teams’ (2020) and picked the six thinking hats for rapid ideation. I then used the braindump method to complete my ideas below:
I enjoyed this process, specifically the playing around with the meaning of sustainability and how it could be applied both within a narrative and also a mechanical gameplay sense. Although this was somewhat time consuming, I felt that once we reached the set deadline the ideas were shortlisted pretty quickly.
One of my ideas - a retro styled 2D isometric survival crafting game around the idea of sustainability - was actually voted to use for the final project. We decided to combine this with one of the other shortlisted ideas - a prehistoric tribe with a dependency on their every burning source of fire - to create a more interesting theme to build the initial game mechanics from.
This was a great idea, we felt that this would allow us to add an unusual take or selling point for the very popular survival/crafting genre and also more closely link into the topic of sustainability.
Finally we used de Bono's Six Thinking Hats technique to encourage discussion and further ideation on the final idea, this allowed everyone to see things from a different point of view and help with further decision making.
References:
Embracing Asynchronous Communication. 2021. GitLab [online]. Available at: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/ [accessed 8 Jun 2021].
Six Thinking Hats. 2021. [online] Available at: https://www.debonogroup.com/ [Accessed 29 March 2021].
Creately Blog. (2020). The Complete List of Ideation Techniques for Remote Teams. [online] Available at: https://creately.com/blog/diagrams/ideation-techniques-with-templates/ [Accessed 5 Aug. 2021].
The Complete List of Ideation Techniques for Remote Teams. 2020. Creately Blog [online]. Available at: https://creately.com/blog/diagrams/ideation-techniques-with-templates/ [accessed 7 Jun 2021].
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