Final Reflection

In terms of the module as a whole, there is a lot of cover in general but I did manage to learn a lot of new things along my journey of getting back into education as well. In terms of this module, I highly enjoyed my time doing so.

Pros

Overall, the ideation is normally my strong suit going ahead with a lot of these seperate projects, while all of it was group work, I did manage to let my individual ideas shine through. From the beginning of the module, my understanding of various mechanics (in this case interactions for the player) already sparked back up very quickly and I was open to incorporating a number of different ideas during the paper prototyping stage, my suggestions on concepts, narrative tools (if any) and presentation were good. The development of all of my concepts were all written down, I know I don’t really need to say this, but note-taking is where I shine a lot of the time and it helps me remember the core concepts as they become more refined along the process.

Making those notes helped me create interesting concepts, both with the Final Project of the module as well as the simple digital prototype. I like to think differently by exploring options that aren’t the first concept that comes into my head. I’d rather take more thoughts and mix them up than just thinking one dimensionally. For example, when we were given the theme of Impulse for the final project, well impulsive shopping comes to mind, so should I make a shopping game where I have this mother go on to buy a heap of clothes/shoes….. I could’ve, but I didn’t want to.

I learned a lot of different aspects in the design process how every little thing I create or use has to be coherent to the concept. I guess that’s the key word. One particular idea was Sound Design…..

I’ve already had experience in this and when coming down to developing any of the concepts involved, I chose to not focus on that instead focus on the unknowing. Building my own skillset rather than things I already know. Again traditional thinking is something I wanted to conform to.

Finally, using my own individual ideas, my inexperience to my advantage, and pure passion helped me build the idea of the final project

Cons

Even with the challenges, I still feel as though my scope may have been a problem, even during this whole process I did think big and the ambition left a project that wasn’t all up to scratch, yes it showed the interaction and the the boundless pieces of artefacts that came with it to make it coherant, but the prototype I personally failed on

Even though I am thankful for the team I got, with the experience they had, I will say they probably helped with through the process more than I helped them as even now even with my knowledge of coding being good, the actual typing of creating that code wasn’t there and I didn’t contribute much to that throughout the porcess. One thing that I am scared to do is coding as I’ve always had a difficulty writing it. You could argue that visual scripting has now made it easier, which I has and I did try, but yet still felt like it wasn’t good enough, so I only helped with things I knew I could help with. So now what I need to learn or at least push and strive towards more is being able to code at least, so my ideas can come to fruition. I can show my working and my ideas with more confidence and probably it will be more understandable

Another thing, I felt was something I need to supress my imagination, not that it needs to be limited, but it needs focus which near the beginning is something I was struggling with during the whole module, however, thankfully I grew into and really started to break down my own thinking process step-by-step instead of just showing the whole thing. Which I think now I belive the process is equally as important as the final result and that’s something I need to work on.

Now from this experience, I’ve also learned how to better improve my ideas, taking much needed advice when needed and realise I need to work on a few skills of my own and really being concise with my ideas. taking into account all the small details which creates a big impact.