Games - Hobby to Career

About the project Brainstorming & initial research Initial project setup Camera Movement & navigation The Inventory System The Dialogue System Game progress & data storage Animation & Cutscenes UI…

Assignment Submission In the middle of week 12 was the the deadline for submission of the pitch presentation and documentation. This was the culmination of all work the team has put together in both…

Leadership Being a team leader is of course a lot of work. Most of my time has been spent discussing with the team what needs to be done to ensure everybody understands it and we are making consistent…

Assignment Preparation As the deadline for the group assignment gets closer, I created a list of tasks that need to be done before the submission. The team reviewed them and agreed. Once the plan was…

Losing a team member This week our UX Designer Mary decided to take a break from the course and continue in the future. This came as a surprise for the team. Regardless, we support her in her decision…

In Week 8 the team raised some long-hidden concerns. Being part of the team Early this week, our UX designer Mary raised some major concerns she had. She felt left out and felt that the team was…

This week we finally solved our 3D assets bottleneck. Blend of skills Our supervisor Giovanni prompted me to think about utilising more Asset Store (Unity Technologies, 2021) assets to reduce some of…

Halfway through the course, it is time for a mock pitch. "Will pitch for money" Pitching is something every professional has to do in one way or another in their profession. I like to look at it in a…

Week 5 is when all the materials came together (and had a party). Shaders This week my tasks have all been around the shaders for the different materials players will be able to change the environment…

Week 4 for The Cake is a Lie team was single-handedly the busiest week so far! Creating the first-person hands One of the reasons we chose to go for a first-person game is to reduce the complexity of…

Week 3 was when team The Cake is a Lie really took the batter and started cooking! Teamwork FTW This week the team really joined together and collaborated. We got the whole team on a call and spent…

Joined Together After a long break from the previous game jam, I participated in it was time for another one. This time it was the GMTK Game Jam's turn. I've been watching GMTK's videos for a long…

The second week has been rather uneventful for The Cake is a Lie team. However, we did progress with our ideation. Ideation We continued with our ideation from week 1 and expanded on the idea we had…

Welcome to my Development Log. The second course in my Indie Game Development masters degree called Co-Creative Design & Development Practice has started and it is time to dig into it. Forming the…

Transcript (same as the text below) Intro Eight years ago when I travelled to Glasgow to study Software Engineering I wanted to go into the Games industry and make games for a living. However, the web…

An intro to Indie Game Development The Development Practice course was a great introduction to the Indie Game Development degree, letting me take another look into practices I have already adopted as…

Ludum Dare with IGD In this second game jam of the year, I had the opportunity to join another five students from my Development Practice course. I enjoyed working in a team after working by myself in…

Branding Personal branding is the effort to market and differentiate oneself from the crowd (Khedher, 2014). The importance of the personal brand for indie game development is enormous and can be…

What is to be Agile Early in the Development Practice course, we looked at different development methods, and in particular the Agile methods. In my blog post I compared them and reflected on my…

Now that the second Rapid Ideation session is complete, it is time to look back and reflect on it. Execution During the theme reveal webinar, Jamie White suggested we should jump into the action and…

This time I opted for the Four Ls retrospective format. After five minutes I had some notes in each category. Liked Because I didn't achieve all of my goals during the first Rapid Ideation Session, I…

Communities of practice are groups of people sharing a common concern or interest for something they do or are learning how to do better as they interact with each other (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger…

Goals Similarly to the first Rapid Ideation Session, I started with defining the goals I would like to achieve. Theme The theme for this rapid ideation session is - our creations should be guided…

Research Research is a topic covered in almost any university course because of how important it is for any successful product. A good product needs appropriate data to support the decision making…

Version Control is one of the most important aspects of development nowadays (Spinellis, 2005). People make mistakes and hardware is volatile, and these are only a couple of reasons why years of…

The second sprint of the Development Practice course included the exciting first Rapid Ideation session. Since it took most of the sprint and I've already written a blog post about it, I decided to…

The Rapid Ideation Session 1 officially ended this Wednesday. At the start of the two-week-long session, I wrote about the goals I would like to achieve. Now is the time to review and reflect on what…

The topic of reflection is a recurring one in this course. Its value was made clear from the start and its importance for the success of each student's goals is reinforced every single week. Spark…

Goals The first Rapid Ideation activity started with the reveal of the theme during the weekly webinar. I didn't want to start working before setting some objectives for the two weeks of ideation and…

After the first sprint of the Development Practice course, I decided to do a quick retrospective to see what I can improve in my approach to the course and increase what I gain from it. Learned so far…

The task for this challenge was to choose an artefact to reverse engineer and prototype. Since I am part of the Indie Game Development cohort, I wanted to focus on games. As always, choosing something…

From a theme to a fun experience Rapid Ideation techniques are common in many industries. They can take the form of Hackathons or, more commonly in the Game Development industry, Game Jams. The focus…

The challenge for the second week of Development Practice was to select an initial artefact, go through an ideation session using the techniques discussed and modify the artefact. After a lot of…

To me, creativity is the ability to use knowledge and experience in new ways to solve different problems. This theory is explored by Tanya Krzywinska's video from week 2. She covers how human…

Reflective writing is the main focus and assessment of the Development Practice course. The very first task we had was to create our blogs so we are set to write our reflections on all topics related…

My first game jam Like many other participants, this was my very first game jam. I've participated in hackathons, but I've worked exclusively with programmers. I powered through my impostor's syndrome…

The first week of the Development Practice course we started looking at time management and how different development methods can be utilised to improve it. In this post, I will quickly cover the…

Each week in the Development Practice course we are given a different challenge to do, have some fun and share it wil the rest of the people in the course. During the first week our challenge was to…

Hi, I am Georgi Tsaklev, a Senior Software Engineer. I've recently started the MA Indie Game Development course at Falmouth University and I am going to be using this blog to record my journey through…