Development Blog #1: Where Am I Now
As of the writing of this piece, I am in my third year of study at college pursuing a degree in videogame design. In my education I have also branched out first into a little bit of 3d modeling, and more recently into game writing, which I intend to minor in.
Over the last few years I’ve participated in several small production projects, mostly focusing on the agile process, that is iterative design.
One of (in my opinion) my best projects, Slidey Painty, was created with the help of Howard de Paiva (producer), Brittany Ollendieck (artist), and Nicholas Perrell and Brendan L’Abbe (programmers). The game itself is simple enough, though it was probably one of the first games with a polish to it that I made, not as a solo project with a designer doing all the art and programming, but something where I was able to focus my efforts on design.
https://youtu.be/IPxJTAymMVE
The game is about robots competing to paint the floor in their color, there were several different levels and powerups by the time we finished making the game, the design of which I did. This was also one of my first group projects where each member of the group had a firm grasp on what they were trying to do, and so we were able to really practice with our communicative skills as well as our technical ones.
Outside of group projects, I do consider visual documentation to be something of a strength of mine, along with a better understanding of 3d art then most designers may have.
I’ve made a good number of documents and believe that I’ve at least gotten a good grasp on how to convey the baseline ideas of a game in very little space.
Going forwards I would like to improve upon my work within a team. The game I showed above was very specifically one of the few group projects I participated in that turned out well, partially due to the fact that the class that was for was during the first semester our college was effected by covid, and our later projects were all remote and in my opinion did not quite get to the same level. I would also like to be able to employ narrative in my designs more directly, and generally improve my writing of characters so that players feel less like they are playing a game and more like they are interacting with a story. Though I admit that at time of writing, those kinds of games are usually less what is being focused on.
All in all I consider myself to be in an ok space for design progress in my education, and I very much look forward to being able to work with a team again, and to see what new projects we might complete.
