Day: Mar 8, 2019

Critical reflection and Journaling

I like this next video. You need to recognise where your problems are and then develop concrete plans. This is the purpose of the journal. This is important because we all come from different sets of experience and although the skill of reflection is able to be learned, what you reflect upon will be highly personal. He goes onto talk about a phrase I learned a few years ago from a book called Bounce. Deliberate practice. I understand that to be creating tasks, drills and so on that focus mostly or entirely on the weak areas of your skill or knowledge so as to improve yourself. I have always found that the improvements are found in the areas that hurt. Those areas of your activity that make you say to yourself, ‘I just dont get this’ or ‘wow, this is really hard’ I remember learning to double tap on to guitar (many years ago now though 😉 ) something that I thought I would never, ever be able to do. I think that I am lucky to have that mindset naturally but I am well aware that there is always room for improvement. What Dr. Scott says about the middle ground between perfectionism and be ‘good enough’ reminds me of another book that I read a long time ago and respect greatly.

Mindset by Carol Dweck (and no, I didn’t know that this book was in the material this week) is an incredible account of the research that she and others carried out regarding the results that people can get in terms of personal growth and progress, when they adopt a ‘effort is the key’ type of mentality over a ‘this is how smart I am and if its not enough, I quit’ style of thinking. Because of that book, I never praise Sophie, my daughter, for being clever, although she is. We always praise the effort, the trying, the problem solving and point out at every opportunity how those things have lead her to where she is, even if thats just eating over her plate, or remembering to put her cloths away.

Reflection can be a painful process for people who have not seen all the links in the chain yet. I mean that until you have identified something that you do poorly or dont do at all, found better alternatives, practised them to the point of proficiency and fully incorporated them into your practice, it can feel like a deeply negative experience. I think that a mentor is very useful in the early days as not only will they be able to help you identify that things that you need to change (raise the bar) they will be able to advise on how to get that done (how to reach the bar).

Identify what you are lacking in these areas and define a plan to solve them. No doubt then that a skill in planning would go down quite well too then? In this context, it is clear that its very important to know ‘where’ your heading and what set of skills you wish to end up mastering. That sounds kind of obvious but I have met people who have little idea what they want to do and have experienced this myself many times in my life.

In talking about the students that he has seen who lack the ability to move on from problem and their need to step back from the issue, I am reminded that this in itself is a learn-able skill, something that many people are not born with. Personally, (time for some reflection.. ) I tend to try to get closer to the problem I am facing and on rare occasions that seems to work for me. Think about locking yourself in a room and refusing to come out until that problem is solved and thats how I have dealt with many of my challenges. But, as I have gotten a little older I have realised that although I still have a tendency to do that now, I do it less. I am more willing to come away from the issue or talk it through while pacing about or even, if I really cant get something, talking to myself in the mirror. Everyone does it!

Challenge and how to make a plan to solve it

• Why have you encountered it.
  • I think I tackle this part of the structure quite well and am usually able to say that I am encountering some problem because of something I am trying to achieve and link the two together well enough. “I am having a problem with the AI because I need it to go over there when this event happens, but I have not done that before so I need to learn how that works”.
• How has it arisen
  • This is an area that I think I could detail a little more clearly when I am reflecting on my own experience. I tend to just jump right in with what I am struggling with and not really how that came to be. I suppose that I think about the context in which this journal is being created and think that the origin of the problem is self evident. I think I might be wrong about that and in any case, it would only add to the integrity of the discussion, even if it is just with myself at the moment!
• What you may be able to do to overcome it
  • This is much more the area that I and I think others are comfortable in. This is what I’m going to do about it. So I think that the value in this part of the course material for me is to perhaps consider in more detail ‘why’ I have come across the problem of challenge and then ‘How’ that happened. There, I think, I will find things that may inform me as to mistakes that I could be making right now.

Meaningful, Purposeful Practice

Meaningful and purposeful practice. This ties in a little with what I was saying above about the book, Bounce. Its the account of how a table tennis player became the best in the country from what I can remember (its been a few years since I have read it) but one of the most interesting parts of the book talked about the fact that the majority of the top tier players England at the time all came from within a few streets of each other. His point was that how the couch worked and what they focused on, plus the 24 hour a day access to the practice room, showed that the practice routine and its personalisation was much more important than the native skill that any single player had. I do think that talent matters, but I think that talent without practice and discipline is soon overshadowed by the people in the room that work every hour they can with a humble attitude. Of course, champions are usually the combination of the two I think.

The conversation about the right level of challenge reminds me of the boredom/anxiety chart that is used to illustrate the best place for gameplay to sit, although as I type that, Im sure it existed before that and more likely associated with what Dr. Scott is talking about here.

Planning

Its interesting to hear Dr. Scott talk about the ‘reflective practitioner’ that does not really write anything down but is constantly ‘thinking’ about how they need to improve. Guilty. I do this and its surprising really as I know that I got a lot of value from all of the journals that I had to write for the BA Top Up course that I did. I wasn’t shy about it either and I think that my journals were around 80 to 100 thousand words each. My apologies to Steve Howard and anyone else that had to read them! But, I was on the back foot when I first began and everything was new to me. I had to reflect constantly just to have a good guess as to where I needed to be next. I think that in other work, away from academic study and marking, I just don’t do it. I think thats a mistake. I could keep something just for myself that is not as wordy and readable and more like the notes that I took for the Game Jam just gone.

Planning, without the exercise of journaling could I think be slightly off target. Although having watched most of this presentation now I am comfortable that I do have a system in place to define and help my track the hours paid to certain endeavour’s in the form of my trusty Nerd Chart. I think I either have already or will post a blog entry about the Nerd Chart and how I think about that stuff. I do wonder though if I would benefit from defining a goal too, and not just tracking the hours done. I run a Kanban board for Serial Link so that is tracked, I watch and complete the tasks for the MA so that is tracked, I am completing a structured Udemy course in order to learn C++… Actually on reflection 😉 I think Im doing quite well in this area!

Prototyping Methods

I didn’t think that I knew much about the ideation process and how to get those ideas to prototype, but as I sit an review this presentation and think about it, I might be being a little hard on myself. That said, I would very much like to spend some time learning some other techniques but I will share what I do at the moment.

Why would I want to play it?

I start with this as I know that to go a really good job at something like this, I really do need to love what I am doing. That’s not to say that I don’t through myself into thing’s I don’t like if I have to but let’s look at the best case. Whats the reason I want to play it? I want to know this as I think that a lot of other design decisions come from the answer.

How should the player feel?

Should they feel in control, out of control, safe, threatened, excited, intrigued, and so on. In my short experience, the fewer things I am trying to implement, they better my chances that I could deliver.

What the main problem they are solving?

For instance, in Serial Link: Get out of the building, killing everything you have to. In the Hostage Rescue prototype: Get the hostages out, dont get killed. Keeping this in mind helps me to know if whatever feature or improvement I am considering is adding to that core issue or not. This conversation with myself or the other team members would be the one that should lead to the core mechanics and define the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of our player solving the problems.

What does the world look like in style or level of graphic content?

What should the thing actually look like on screen to match the other things that I have already decided on. I don’t have a lot of experience with art and artist’s in this area, as my level of skill has dictated that I spend more time looking at the core mechanics of the games I have worked on, but I think that might be changing now. I do try to draw some parallel to something I already know about though like, ‘it should look like Alien’ or ‘it should sound like Bullet Time from the Matrix’ that sort of thing. Its not a design although it does communicate what I mean at this early stage.

How close is it to the ‘real world’ or at least the feeling that its grounded?

I like grounded games. I like to see fantastical things but get the sense that, yes, that could sort of happen. Splinter Cell is a good example of that sort of thing. Although I am aware of rare occasions where one man has caused much enemy devastation, its not the norm. Sam Fisher makes it look like another day at the office, but the way that its presented for the most part, makes it quite believable. As far actually doing this? Its more by feel and gut I think but if I had to narrow it down I would say that its physics. I dont just mean thing realistically bouncing around in the level, but things like animations that look heavy enough, occluded sound, light doing what your brain thinks it should do, that sort of thing.

Using ‘User Stories’

I didn’t know that these had a real name, but it turn’s out that I use ‘User Stories’ to do most of the design work. I imagine playing the game and say something like ‘the player jumps over the wall while firing the small machine pistol at the mech in front. Black liquid spills from the multiple piercings that the rounds cause, forming globulous splatter patterns on the surfaces it hits. The player lands, quickly taking aim with the defensive measure he had in the other hand and throws it to the floor while shooting at the other threat in the room…’ There is lots of information there that would inform lots of different aspects of the design and would probably be enough to make a start on a prototype!

Bits and pieces

However, the above is quite high level and once you really start digging in, you can find that there are details missing that you really do need to know. This is where I might use a mind map and word association exercises. I really like a good thesaurus and I find it very useful to see key words or phrases expressed differently as they can send your thoughts of into places where there are more answers and ideas. Scope becomes the enemy here though as I often find that I am coming up with for too much stuff!

Other ways I could do it…

Theme, World and Story. This is not a way that I have explored design before as I think that I am much more naturally drawn to mechanics, so the user story suits me much better. This could satisfy an itch I have had for a long time though. I would like to write a little. I don’t know if I would be any good at it but as with most things, the more you do it the better you get. Now that I think about it, this really might be an opportunity to exercise that desire and see where it goes. I do have to be careful though as I am in danger already of creating a to do list that I know I can’t complete! I wonder though…

Slow boil approach. This made me smile because for me this is the ‘you don’t have time now because you have agreed to these other bazillion things you have to do, so when you sitting on the loo, you can thing about this one…’ Now I can rest knowing that there is a proper name for my lack of execution opportunity! Although there is that part about the research… I like my version.

Creating something based on an existing Intellectual Property. I have never done this so my opinion is just that about a relevant as a guy who is considering these things and reflecting on them… Wait a minute…

IP and trying not to get sued

The best ‘pro’ I can see is a ready audience and a very well defined set of expectations. Having tried already to make a game (and continuing to) I think that one of the biggest challenges is the ‘what is it’ one. With Batman for instance, we know what that is, we can relate to what a game about Batman should be like way before we see a single frame of the finished piece. This is reassuring to the money people too as they can measure customer interest in such a venture much more easily.

The worst ‘con’ is almost exactly what I wrote above. The customer has a notion of what your thing should do, how it should do it, what it should feel like and so on. As far as the developer goes, its not really ‘your thing’ at all. I suspect that when developers are working on title that are backed by an existing IP, the scope in which they can be creative is reduced so much that to some I can imagine that its quite a limiting and choking experience. But if you want to turn a con into a pro (and I like doing that) then if this kind of project is in the hands of developers who already are one of those customers, one of those fans, then they should know just what to do with it. Assuming that they are competent developers that is. Like me. Ha! Well, Im trying to be…

I do have an IP based project in mind that I would love to work on. John Wick. I would love to (and probably will) tackle the puzzle of just how to make the player feel like John Wick. I would like to isolate sequences from the movie and come up control systems and mechanics that would allow the player to recreate them in game. It would be a huge project really but I think that it could be broken down into something that could be started… I have a couple of ideas already about how I might do about implementing this but that’s for me and little brain right now. Further to this, I have just come across the part of the presentation that talks about using a ‘Requirements animations’ or ‘Ripomatics’ where you take footage from movies, game, television or music to outline what the game should do or how it should feel while the player is using it. The movies are the obvious place to draw this from, its just nice to know that there is a term floating around to covers it.

Increasing the number of iterative cycles

This is a very important lesson I think. Making sure that all the areas of a game (as thats what Im here to make) need to be equally developed as much as possible. By that I mean that if the game has buying, selling, swapping and item storage as core gameplay mechanics then I really like to make sure that there is one single active goal in each one of those areas. In an ideal world, or development session, I try to complete the task in ‘buying’ and then move onto completing the task in ‘selling’ and so on. Sounds simple but how many developers struggle with ‘feature creep’ and in particular feature creep within some narrow scope? It used to happen to me all the time. The first time I tried to solve it was to list all the major areas of the project including the traditional ones like animation and audio and so on. Then I listed all the areas that were specific to the game I was making. So, in Serial Link they were something like

• Shooting
• Psi Powers
• Soldier AI
• Squad AI
• And so on…

Then I had just one thing that I would want to get completed in that area to move the game on. Once all of the tasks had been completed I would move onto a second cycle. Any other ideas, and lets face it there are always ton’s of them, were recorded in a kind of Idea Dump. Then that could be used to populate the next cycles tasks in the various areas. However, there was the problem that you (the developer) could still choose what you wanted to work on in any given session as there were many, many active tasks. That lead me to Kanban.

Kanban is the most complete development tool I have found that fully supports the idea of iterative development although I don’t think that it looks like that from the outside. I think one of the biggest challenges that I have faced and still do really, is making sure that I deliver complete features at a time. There is a version of Kanban that was presented here and its just a little different from the Kanban information that I had come across before in that there were three things that he did a little differently. The first is the Work In Progress (WIP) limits that stop work being pulled from the right of the board relentlessly, killing the boards ability to provide focus. The next is the inclusion of a ‘finished’ sub-column within each of the main column’s. This is a great addition as you more clearly see where the hold ups in the project are happening. And the last one is very clearly defined ‘Done Rules’. This is the part that makes sure that work does not slip through that is not to the right standard. Having the done rules stated clearly leaves no ambiguity when the team member is deciding whether a work item is done or not. Having a ‘build’ column with a small WIP is the key to making sure that the project is being developed in iterative cycles. That combined with making sure that tasks are being selected from across all the areas of development like I talked about earlier makes sure that the whole thing is growing and not just certain (using the developers favourite) parts. So that takes care of the ‘prototyping’. Having another column called ‘User Test’ with a small WIP (like one or two) will only allow a small number of builds to happen before the project must be tested by some defined audience. That audience would depend on what the project is and how far through it the developers are.

There isn’t a scrum part to this thinking… I just really liked the image and thought it close enough.

I have no other plans at the moment on how I can improve my ability to develop in iterative cycles aside from the constant refinement of the ideas and tools that I am already using. If I sense that they are not sufficient for some reason, or I inadvertently come across information that makes me question my approach, then I will respond to that.