Week 4 - Rapid ideation session 1 - part 1

Last week marked the beginning of the first rapid ideation session of the development practice module I'm following at the moment. I have been looking forward to it and I dove right in! In this post I will discuss the brief, how I went about my ideation, and the status of my prototype.

Disclaimer: This will be a lengthier post full of my ramblings 🙃

The challenge brief

For this rapid ideation session we have two weeks to create an artefact based on our theme. The theme has two parts, consisting of a dixit card and a news headline of your choosing. Does that sound confusing? It for sure did to me at first. It becomes a little clearer when we take a look at the card though:

The card is completely open to interpretation. There is no right or wrong understanding of the card.

As I mentioned, the other half of the theme consists of a news headline of your choosing. At first I did not really get why we could not just stick to the card as the card already opens up a lot of different ways to go about this. But after thinking about it I'm actually quite happy we could shape the theme a bit more. You can pick any news headline after all so this provides you with an opportunity to steer the theme into a direction that suits you (and your learning goals).

Focus areas for this rapid ideation session

Before I dive into how I started working on this challenge and how it is going, I want to spend some time on what I hope to get out of it. There are loads of different topics within game development that excite me or that would be fruitfull for my personal development and this RI session is a great way to incorporate some of them.

The games I am most interested in developing on the long run are action-adventure games like Dante's Inferno, God of War and Prince of Persia. There are specific properties of a game that make it enjoyable for me:

• The world: I am a sucker for the artwork of a game in general but especially for the level environments and the atmosphere of the world you are playing in in general. For me the world is what can achieve this immersive feeling some games have. It is almost like with a good movie, where you are really transported mentally into this other realm.

• Good character design: If I don't like how the characters look, I am not interested in playing it! This does not mean that they have to be super fancy for me, simplistic characters like in superhot are fine. It just means that if the style of a game puts me off I won't enjoy it. This is of course incredibly subjective and different for everyone. It is more that if I already don't like playing a game like that, I will for sure not enjoy creating it either.

• Combat with an intellectual challenge: Although I do enjoy pure hack-n-slash type games like Warhammer: Vermintide, they are often not games I come back to later. The games I tend to revisit are games where there is an intellectual component as well, for instance via puzzles.

• New and exciting weapons: How exciting is it when you get to play with an exciting new weapon that is not the typical gun/sword/bow set? Think for instance of the Blades of Chaos from god of war or the insect Glaive from Monster Hunter World! They bring with them new mechanics that allow for a very different fighting style to explore.

• Epic boss fights: Boss fights can be so rewarding, both in the actual rewards your player gains from it as in the fight mechanics. I enjoy how boss fights tend to challenge your tactics. Sometimes the way you have been playing isn't suitable for this boss and you have to invent a new strategy.

Video 1: A videoclip showcasing the mentioned chaos blades in God of War.

To gain the most out of this RI session I aim to focus on some of the aforementioned properties. Considering the time constraint of this challenge I have decided to leave character design and innovative weapons behind for now. This challenge I want to focus primarily on the boss fight and the world design. If time permits it I can also incorporate a small intellectual challenge but we will have to see how it goes.

Why do I want to focus on the boss fight and the world design? For one because it would be fruitful to learn more about these topics with the type of games I would like to make in the future. In addition I really want to work on a boss fight since I simply have not done that yet before. In the game projects I have been involved in up until now I have never had the chance to make an enemy AI or to set up fight mechanics. This RI session seems like a good time to try it out. I have done world design before, but it has been quite a while and my skills are veeeery rusty. By incorporating world design as one of the two focus points for this challenge I have one thing that is in my comfort zone, while the other is completely out of my comfort zone. I felt like this would be beneficial in case I get stuck or frustrated with the fight mechanics.

The ideation phase: coming up with a concept

I have quite some "design thinking" experience and I do brainstorms often. Therefore I decided to limit the time I spent on the brainstorming phase for this challenge to allow more time for the prototyping part, which I have not done that much. I felt like that would allow me to make the most of this challenge.

I decided to try out something different for the brainstorming part of this challenge to not do it "like I always do it". Normally I like to use carousel brainstorming and mindmaps when brainstorming with a group. When I need to brainstorm individually I research various aspects of a topic and just let it simmer. Most ideas pop up just before I go to sleep in bed, I iterate over them and write down the best ones in my phone to inspect the next morning. As you can guess this is quite unstructured. For me it works because it lets my brain roam free, but it is not very dependable of course. This time I did it more structured, using trusty sticky notes right from the getgo! I started out by writing concepts and items I associated with our dixit card on sticky notes. Afterwards I looked at a newspaper for interesting sounding newspaper headlines and wrote them down on sticky notes of a different colour. I put both up on my fridge (yup you read that right) and started looking for connections and potentially interesting combinations between the two types of sticky notes. When looking at combinations of sticky notes I wrote down concept ideas on blue sticky notes.

Figure 1: I glimpse of my fridge full of sticky notes for brainstorming!

Great! I've got a bunch of blue sticky notes with potential concepts at this point. Time to converge. I quickly weeded out concepts that didn't excite me and worked out my top two in more detail in my notebook.

Time to present to you my chosen concept, based on the card and the news headline "Dansende giganten" (translated: dancing giants):

Ever since the beginning of time, the old and wise Dierumvitae has chronicled life. He wrote what would happen, and it happened. It shaped fate and our very existence. About a month ago, however, the Dierumvitae fell still and stopped his writing in the book of fate. Without his writing life will soon cease to exist... Already now the world is becoming dorren and lifeless without his touch, we don't have long before it is lost. It has been rumoured that the Elemental Giants might have the power to change things, but they hold immense power and are not to fond of visitors... Do you have the guts to find them to get the Dierumvitae to write again?

I hope you are as excited for my concept as I am!

What did I learn from the more structured brainstorm approach?

I learned that it works, but I felt that it worked less than my normal unstructured variant. I felt limited by the structure and it hampered my speed of idea generation. I have the feeling that it would be very useful if I have a creative block and can't think of anything because I did feel that I could more easily explore new directions via new combinations of sticky notes. Normally I do not have this issue though. Instead I think of too many concepts which makes it difficult to converge later. I don't think I will brainstorm in this way anytime soon as it was not for me, but it was a good thing to try out.

Bringing the concept to life

Now that I have a concept it is time to bring it to life with a prototype!! Before staring I mapped out the scope of my prototype, to get it down to something achievable (hopefully, wish me luck). For my scope I decided on the following deliverables:

• 1 Level with a dessert terrain

• 1 animated Elemental Giant (the enemy/boss), modelled myself, with two attacks: - a randomized pillar attack which erupts pillars from the ground that move radially outwards - some other attack that I have yet to think of

• An animated dummy main character (can be some open source model) with two attacks: a ranged and a close combat one. The ranged attack should make use of VFX

• A trigger that makes the giant show up

• If time permits it: a small cutscene introducing the elemental giant

I will be working in Unity for developing the game and in Blender for the modeling/animating part of this project. To help me stay on track I am working with a basic Kanban board in my GitHub project to keep track of my todos.

I am working on the prototype already but it is not yet at a point where I can post some screengrabs from it so I will make a part 2 of this blog post for the prototyping!