Two Week Projects

We have been working in teams of five again but this time for two weeks. A game jam is typically a very short experience. A manic sort of rush to get something simple, working, and ready to present in a short period of time. Small game projects, in my experience at least, are a month or more to try and make something that feels ‘finished.’ This has left this two week project in a very strange mental space. It has become either an extremely long game jam or a very short game development time.

The first step of the project involved creation of the concept and project planning. The first two days were consumed with small informal idea pitching within the group. The prompt with its starting places for games offered themes and we finally settled on a genre to work in, horror. Much of the project was carried out with morning stand ups. I've found that while working under mental duress in part from social pressures and the pressure of a conflicted group, my work suffers greatly.

Reflection on the finished project leads me to believe the concept was interesting, but the execution. There are a great many things I would do differently. On a short project with a small team like this it is my feeling that having a full time manager can become a burden. Constant oversight, but a lack of prioritizing, and the loss of a contributor weighed heavily on the production process. Not every project has to be perfect and the best work one has ever produced but I had hoped to come much closer.

After the class was reshuffled into proposal teams for the final larger project. It will be interesting going forward to see the results of this new team.

Project In Project Out

Week Two:

Monday was a holiday so the first day of class this week was Tuesday. My team presented out game with a few technical hiccups. The projector for the classroom had some unusual resolution read outs that led us to believe it was one resolution, but in fact was outputting a different resolution. It was a lesson in not believing computer outputs without testing them thoroughly.  It was decided early on because we had very little time to actually make a set resolution for the game to run on. It always plays at 1080p.

Our small game project can be download here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BxMTrKoZwZ5MTTkxT3FVbXhQWGs&usp=sharing

After the presentation the class was again divided up into teams. Everyone was shuffled so that we could all meet new people in our class. This new project will last two weeks and be presented on the 17^th. Our team has decided to run on a horror theme in a 2D environment. I will hopefully be able to share that project when it is finished but this is the rough cover/inspiration piece for the project.

Lecture this week has moved onto pre-production and pitching of games. The early life of the project and examples of how they are put to paper can drastically change the possible success of a project. There are several methodologies and written formats for the projects in our morning lectures. Although there seems to be one of the key ideas has been ‘know your audience.’ Presentations had have been very success to certain companies and individuals would be entirely in appropriate for others.  

A closing thought about the city close to the campus. I have been told that the city of Austin as a whole is not properly represented by the drag and the areas immediately around it. That being said I have had a few strange run-ins with individuals that linger around campus. I have made an effort not to be in these areas late at night. There are quite a number of students roaming about before 9 pm so I head home in plenty of time to be home before then. 

All Ahead Full

This is a weekly experience blog by Richelle Rueda focusing on the 2014-2015 post graduate program at the Denis-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas in Austin. The official site for the program can be found here: http://moody.utexas.edu/gaming-academy.  It will be separated into comments about the program, school, city, etc. to the best of this writer’s ability but it is all through on particular perspective and results may vary from person to person. Average age of the program seems to fall somewhere in the mid-twenties with a variety of backgrounds ranging from years of work experience to freshly out of school. Information about all of the students for the class this year can be found here: http://moody.utexas.edu/gaming-academy/inaugural-class.

Week One:

                Orientation too place on Tuesday. The majority of the twenty students and three of the faculty met the day before class. We were walked to our future class location. The lab is small but pretty. Each computer station has a beautiful tower and duel monitors. The Wacom cintiqs have not yet arrived, but all the equipment is new and in top form. The building’s hours of operation have unfortunately truncated the hours of availability of these labs though. The building closes at 11 pm each night which has made for an unusual situation given the nocturnal nature of many of the students. This may end up being for the best in the sense that it forces students to go home and encourages regular sleep hours. The down side will certainly be the lack of safety net that a 24 hour lab provides during crunch time.

Also on Tuesday, we took a few tours. The forty acres tour focused on the original forty acres of the U of T campus. While our tour guide was upbeat and surprisingly energetic, the majority of the time was spent looking for shade and somewhere to sit in the heat of the day. The Texas weather did not disappoint in delivering both scorching heat and intense humidity. We visited the video game archives on campus which were, like most buildings, wonderfully air conditioned. The archives also offered an opportunity to look over design documents, original art pieces, and play a few games that predate many of the students in the program.  

The first day of class was focused on ice breakers and introductions. Since the class size is large we did a variation on the two truths and a lie turning it into two lies and a truth. The class was able to vote on which of the three statements was true for each person to some rather amusing results.

Lectures, which were approximately two hours each morning starting at 10 pm, expanded on the first reading assignment, an excerpt from "Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge" about leadership from the writings of Warren Bennis and Burt Manus. These discussions opened debate on what are the important characteristics of leaders and the differences between management and leadership.

After lunch each day has been devoted to lab time. The class of twenty students were divided into four teams of five for the sake of a game jam. The teams were arranged by the faculty in an effort to evenly divide the disciplines among the team. The theme of this jam was 1,000 things. The assignment is due on Tuesday but already all the games seem distinctly different from each other. Now heading into the second week, each game jam team is focused on polishing their game for presentation over the three day weekend.

                A few notes about the city of Austin immediately around the school. Guadalupe Street, also known locally as the drag, has many small restaurants which are by in large reasonably priced for the student budget. There are however many homeless on this street that can be very aggressive when asking for money or food. Also aggressive on the drag are various religious figures handing out bibles. Personally it is this writer’s opinion that it is rather intrusive to have a number of people on my walk to class step into my path to stop me and then thrust a book towards me.