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 technologies industry is much more receptive to young and inexperienced talent. This is why I joined my first job as a Full Stack Web Developer before I even graduated and have been working in that field since.

I wanted to change that and decided to start making games in my spare time. However I felt I didn’t have enough experience solving the typical game development problems and creating simple art assets I would need to complete the games I wanted to make. This is when I found the Indie Game Development Masters course, which seemed like the perfect catalyst for my passion.

Overview of the course

The Development Practice course helped me in two ways. Firstly, it covered topics I was already aware of such as Agile and Version Control. These topics gave me the push to do further research into these fields, analyse and reflect on how I use them. By doing so I was able to improve my own practice and identify gaps in the way my team at work uses Scrum (Akif and Majeed, 2012) and improve the practice of everyone there.

Secondly, the course introduced me to new topics. I see myself as a programmer and not a creative person. This has been one of my main burdens preventing me from creating games. Learning that creativity is interpreting and assuming the gaps in one’s knowledge and that it is characteristic of all humans (Frith, 2012), inspired me to work on my ability to create assets for my games without worrying.

My biggest obstacle in the course has been reflective writing. It wasn’t part of my bachelors degree so it was brand new to me and like other students I found it quite difficult to get used to (Ryan, 2011). Eventually, through the weekly entries and my posts about the game jams I found reflective writing to be beneficial for improving my practice.

Rapid Ideation and Game Jams

What I found most exciting in the course were the rapid ideation sessions. I always learned best by doing rather than reading. For the first one I set myself some very ambitious goals. I wanted to learn Unreal Engine as it is one of the leading game engines out there (The Two Engines Driving the $120B Gaming Industry Forward, 2018). I had previous experience with Unity and I was surprised by how different the two engines are in the assumptions they make on how games should be structured (Unreal Engine 4 For Unity Developers, 2021). I realised that I should have spent more time exploring the tool before jumping into the game creation.

This is why in the second rapid ideation session I set myself more down-to-earth goals that were achievable for the duration. I had never worked on a 2D game before and I knew creating 2D games can be the better approach for some types of games (Kay, 2018). So I set myself to create my first 2D game, which was focused on the topic of the gender pay gap and trying to create impact by increasing the awareness of the problem and how hard it is to solve (Lips, 2013).

During the course, I also participated in two game jams. The Global Game Jam was my first ever game jam where I joined other Bachelors and Masters students from Falmouth to create an amazing game called Tonttu’s Travels (2021). I learned what it is to work on a game in a team and what to prioritise during a game jam. I also joined the Ludum Dare 48 game jam with fellow Development Practice students and got to share my learnings from the Global Game Jam with those who were new to the setting (Le Gardien, 2021). The two game jams have been extremely valuable to me, because they gave me an overview of what it is to create games in a team and how to collaborate with the different disciplines involved.

Further research required

I have been playing a game called Guild Wars 2 for the entire 9 years it has been out. Very few games have managed to pull off this level of engagement and impact, and it inspires me every single day.

In order to get anywhere close to creating such a game I will need to learn more about player engagement and how to create hooks in a game through story, level design and mechanics. I plan to continue looking at the weekly challenges in the following courses as opportunities to practice making games to improve my skills in the way it works best for me - through practice.

The second goal I set myself is around branding and building a community. I have little experience in branding and this is absolutely essential for the success of an indie game or a small indie studio (Tuominen, 2020). I will work on this goal as part of the Indie Start-UP course in my degree and during the final project to prepare myself for creating my own studio once I graduate.

Last but not least, I want to work on more art assets. It is hard to move away from one’s main profession which for me is programming. So while I have created some small assets and learned how to use tools like Affinity Designer for vector graphics (Kato et al., 2006) or Blender for 3D models (Khatri, 2018) I still lack the confidence. I am going to spend more time in the coming courses on building that confidence and preparing myself for the final project and my career after graduation.

You can find all the references and a link to the transcript in the video description. Thank you for watching!

References

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Frith, S., 2012. Creativity as a social fact. Musical imaginations: multidisciplinary perspectives on creativity, performance and perception, pp.62-72.

itch.io. 2021. Tonttu's Travels. [online] Available at: https://mattbaileydesign.itch.io/tonttus-travels [Accessed 8 May 2021].

Kato, Y., Hamada, M. and Inoue, Y., 2006. Multithread shader for 3D and vector graphics. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Research posters (pp. 64-es).

Kay, R., 2018. The future of 2D gaming. [online] GamesIndustry.biz. Available at: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-11-27-the-future-of-2d-gaming [Accessed 8 May 2021].

Khatri, P., 2018. 3D animation: Maya or blender. Global Sci-Tech, 10(1), pp.40-47.

Ldjam.com. 2021. Le Gardien. [online] Available at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$251691 [Accessed 8 May 2021].

Lips, H.M., 2013. The gender pay gap: Challenging the rationalizations. Perceived equity, discrimination, and the limits of human capital models. Sex Roles, 68(3), pp.169-185.

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Tuominen, M., 2020. Branding Methods for Finnish Startup Companies.

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