Week 11 - Progress & Goals

We are nearing the end of the game development practice and it’s time to look back on what I’ve learned and what my goals are for after this module. So how was the progress, and how can I use what I have learned for the rest of the study programme?

The progress of this module

I have approached this module as one big playground to do all the things I have been wanting to do for a while, but for which I never had the time. Not just for random things though, but to explore tools that could help me develop the type of games I want to develop in the future. My goal at the beginning of the module was to use all the exercises and rapid ideation sessions to get more familiar with the Unity game engine and to set up a codebase I can draw upon in the future. Already throughout the course I noticed that every time I opened the Unity editor, I was more comfortable and by now I properly know my way around the editor. Of course, I have more than enough to learn in Unity, but I would consider my goal reached.

In addition to being comfortable in the Unity editor I now also have a budding codebase to use in future projects. For both rapid ideation sessions I put in additional effort to make the core code robust, reusable, and adaptable. I could already taste the fruits of this in the second rapid ideation session, where I could use parts of the interaction and movement logic to speed up the development. I’m sure it will also benefit me in the modules to come.

A side goal I had was to get acquainted with my fellow students, both to make friends and to learn from them. The discord server that Carmen had set up helped for this. Next to that Jake was so kind to take initiative and set up weekly meetings with our study pod. They paved the way for easy contact, and it worked great. I was active in our weekly meetings and on discord. If I needed feedback the others were always willing to give it, and I helped them where I could as well. I am certain that I will be able to reach out to the people I met in later modules as well, even if most of them follow the UX track.

Future goals

Overarching long term goal

I want to use the following modules to get closer to my long-term goal. My long-term goal is to publish my own games. I have no ambition in working for a AAA company and not even for joining an indie studio really, I just want to make my own games from start to finish. I understand though that that is not a very reliable income and that I probably will not be able to do that full time. That’s fine for me however. I am perfectly happy having a steady income from a job in the general software industry, while pursuing my personal interests on the side. I am a very disciplined person and I need my own projects to bite my teeth into.

You might be wondering why I want to go the solo road instead of trying to join another studio. This has to do with the reason why I want to develop games in the first place. I have so many characters and worlds in my head that I feel a strong internal need for to bring alive. This means that I want to have a say in the game design of the games I develop. I want to make the 3D models, animate them, and set them on a digital world of my own. On the other hand, I love coding as well and the math that is involved in it. I have a technical background after all and sometimes I miss the math problems I used to solve! Game development is the one discipline that brings these two needs of mine together. It involves complex mathematics and physics but can also serve as a creative outlet. However, being able to both dig into the code and to have a say in the game design and creation of the 3D assets is tricky in industry, especially in AAA. Generally, you fulfil a specific role(Freeman et al., 2020). The bigger the company the more optimized the team gets. Everyone is a specialist in what they do and honestly, that’s not me. I’m a generalist. I easily learn new skills and I love exploring new tools. Therefore, developing my own thing from A to Z seems to be the best fit for me. With Indie development it is easier to participate in multiple parts of the development, but it will be harder to go for the ideas I believe in. I don’t want to force my game ideas on someone else and in a team there should be space for everyone’s voice to be heard. Maybe I find people who share the same passion and want to go for the same ideas I do, but it’s not what my planning will be dependent on.

Getting closer to the long term goal

Developing your own game from start to finish does not happen overnight and it will take time and hard work. Even more so it needs specific skills over the entire game development domain, from 3D modelling to coding and everything in between. I might feel confident in some of these skills, but I have got loads to learn and explore as well. 3D Game development can generally be broken down in the following parts (Bates, 2004):

• Game Art (modelling, texturing, animating, VFX)

• Level Design

• Programming

• SFX

• Testing

With my Computer Science background and daily job revolving around programming I feel quite confident in my programming skills. I need to explore game engine specific code possibilities, which I have done in the past module and which I will proceed with in the ones to come.

For Game Art there are parts with which I have experience, and parts which are foreign to me. I am okay at modelling and alright at animating, but I still struggle with texturing and more specific things like UV unwrapping. VFX is something I have never really done before. This area is also one I want to focus on in the next module. Game Art is an incredibly important factor of the success of a game (Washburn et al., 2016; Freeman et al., 2020). Therefore, I need to practice enough with producing my own game art as to get better at it.

In terms of level design, I have practiced with the tools of producing levels in the past module, but I have yet to dive into the science behind it. I know how to produce the 3D level, but I need to dive into what makes a level a good one.

SFX is completely foreign to me. I have no experience with any audio tool and have only used minimal audio in my practice so far. Sound is incredibly important for the immersive feel of a game (Ekman, 2008), so I want to develop my skills in this area throughout the upcoming modules.

Testing is in general something that needs to be done by other people as you become blind for your own bugs during development. You know how to play the game after all, and it can be difficult to put yourself in the user’s shoes. Considering that it is not necessarily a skill I will need to get closer to my goals, I will not put a focus on game testing.

SMART goals

To make sure I work on the areas where my skills are currently lacking, I have set the following goals for myself:

• Use SFX in the next practical project in the study programme, to become more acquainted with this area that lies outside of my expertise.

• Model, rig and animate three custom characters in Blender and import it in Unity to practice with the Blender to Unity workflow. I will need this workflow often enough and the only way to get better at it is to do it more frequently. I want to do this in the coming three months

• Learn about different ways of publishing games and business models for indie studios during the Indie Start Up module. At the end of the module, I want to have identified what method of publishing and distribution would work best for me

• I want to work my way through the book “The Art of Game Design” by Jesse Schell before the end of the master’s programme.

Of course, I want to continue to work on my Unity skills any chance I get during the study programme as well. However, that is not very specific but more a general guideline to how I want to approach the modules.

List of References

Bates, B. (2004) Game design. 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Thomson Course Technology. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/game-design/oclc/636245828 (Accessed: August 9, 2021).

Ekman, I. (2008) “Psychologically motivated techniques for emotional sound in computer games,” Proceedings of AudioMostly, pp. 20–26.

Freeman, G. et al. (2020) “‘Pro-Amateur’-Driven Technological Innovation: Participation and Challenges in Indie Game Development,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(GROUP). doi: 10.1145/3375184.

Washburn, M. et al. (2016) “What went right and what went wrong: An analysis of 155 postmortems from game development,” Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 280–289. doi: 10.1145/2889160.2889253.