Week 7 began with the weekly materials focusing on version control and with the second Rapid Ideation session beginning during the weekly webinar.
Version control is not something I'm overly experienced with, unless you consider saving projects to USB sticks or uploading to Dropbox every so often! So I after I looked through the week's course materials and a few YouTube videos I managed to get a better understanding and how it would benefit my general practice and of course the next Rapid Ideation session.
The materials focused on Git version control and GitHub Desktop, which allow the users to set up a repository (the collection of project files that will be tracked), clone the repository so that any changes you make on your device will be tracked by the Git client.
Other features include allowing users to "push and pull" changes to the online repository so that other users can see and access changes and also to create and merge branches - which allows everyone involved to work on and experiment on their copies of the project without the risk of breaking the whole project. Luckily, there is also a "revert to commit" feature in case the worst case scenario happens to revert to the previous working version.
These features would have been useful in my previous Rapid Ideation project, as I managed to completely ruin my progress after following a tutorial for an older version of GameMaker Studio 2 - which resulted in code errors that I could not fix and meant I had to start from scratch again.
Going forward I'll be using GitHub with any future GameMaker Studio projects I work on and see how this affects my methodology and workflow.
As part of this Rapid Ideation session, I decided to set myself some additional targets along my initial goal of making as polished final artefact as I could in the time. These were:
1) To work with someone else and see how I am with remote teamworking
2) Try different Ideation techniques
3) learn more about repositories and project management
So, on to the Webinar and the big reveal of the second Rapid Ideation task! For this task we were told to use Wikipedia and use the random article button to find an; event, person and place. We were to then use these as a starting point for our next project.
I have to admit, I was a little sceptical about this and wondered what I'd end up with and decided to have a couple of goes to reduce the risk of having complete "duds". Whilst I know that this wasn't in the spirit of things, it definitely helped get the creative juices flowing!
I ended up with the following:
The King of Tyre - The King of Tyre was the ruler of Tyre, the ancient Phoenician city in what is now Lebanon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Tyre
The Kinshasa Highway - The Kinshasa Highway is an informal name for a route across the Democratic Republic of the Congo into Uganda and beyond, consisting of paved highways in some places and seasonally impassable tracks in others. The name has gained currency for the role which long-distance truck drivers played in the early spread of AIDS in the 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinshasa_Highway
The Kaidun meteorite - Kaidun is a meteorite that fell on 3 December 1980 on a Soviet military base near what is now Al-Khuraybah in Yemen. A fireball was observed travelling from the northwest to the southeast, and a single stone weighing about 2 kilograms (4.4 lb) was recovered from a small impact pit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaidun_meteorite
After reading through the different subjects I began to have some great ideas and jotted them down. However, as we were encouraged to find a partner for this project I held fire and went on to the Canvas forums and saw that Mikolaj was looking to team up.
I contacted Mikolaj and we agreed to work together and use the project to develop our specific skills. As Mikolaj was going to do the programming, I let him chose the engine we'd be working on and he chose Unity- which was fine with me, as I'd had some experience with it, albiet not for a while.
We started off the project by using the Miro tool, which was a first for myself and a bit of an eye opener - I'd always assumed that using this type of software would be more time consuming than using good old pen and paper, I'd been very wrong!
Miro was also an excellent tool to collaborate with, as it allowed us to work together in real time by placing text, images, stick notes and text conversations/queries as we went. This felt very natural and cohesive and I from my point of view helped with out ideation, where we had a chat and used a technique based around the Crazy 8's method to arrive at our game design.
We produced three ideas each, based around world setting, themes and in-game mechanics - this was the first time I'd used the Crazy 8's method and it was another eye opening moment, I really enjoyed the process and is something I'll definitely use again for future projects.
Once we'd completed this, we began discussing the results and formulating our game concept, which ended up being based around an Antartic military base, where a meteor has damaged the control systems and people have started getting infected.
The gameplay was to be around keeping the other survivors alive and in turn stop them becoming an infected zombie, whilst needing to open airlocks to get more oxygen - which is constantly decreasing. We also wanted to keep the phrase “As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems.” as a strong part of the experience, so we decided to make the ending a little dark (I wont spoil it).
After we both worked on some bits and pieces in Miro, fine tuning our concept and agreeing how we would progress, Mikolaj then concentrated on the programming side of things and began working on making the in-game engine.
I then began researching some concepts and created a moodboard to begin working on my designs, over the next few days we shared progress and feedback. Mikolaj also helped me get aquianted properly with Github so I was able to upload my assets and keep up to date with the project.
One last thing happened before the start of week 8, which was a change in style for the graphics. We'd decided to make our game from a top down perspective and include 8-way movement - something I'd never tried before. After working on the player sprite using PiskelApp (www.piskelapp.com), I decided that I was not going to get the quality I wanted and made the decision to use Inkscape (www.inkscape.org) as I felt I could both get the quality and style I wanted and also do it within the time scale.
I'll explain how this went in my next blog!
References:
DragoniteSpam (2020). Introduction to Source Control - Game Maker Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS-P48YPTpY [Accessed 8 Nov. 2020].
Rubino, G. (2020). [GDD710] Week 7 – GitHub Desktop tutorial. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk?wvideo=spape2kmun [Accessed 8 Nov. 2020].
Miro (2020). About Miro | Meet the team | Our mission. [online] https://miro.com/. Available at: https://miro.com/about/ [Accessed 8 Nov. 2020].
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