1-year milestone. Finish line.

Since this blog series is supposed to be a map of things that I want to take away with me and perhaps refer to at a later point in life, I should tell about the most interesting thing that happened to me. What pushes a first-year student to write an extensive Post Mortem of a whole year of studies­? No, it’s not an iron discipline or a desire to be productive 24/7. I could be doing other things or not […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.5: My beef with artist/codes/producers

This is the second to last thing I want to write about. All the complaints I can think of about the other team members and their line of work.
My “head count” so far:
A luxurious number of artists: 5 different artists with their skills ranging from high to low.
2 Programmers who both were brilliant.
2 producers who together can be considered as much as 0,8 producers. It’s was a complicated situation. One of the producers hated this line of work, we were […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.4 How I thought MDA was useless to me.

MDA stands for Mechanics-Dynamic-Aesthetics. You can read a short paper that introduced MDA as a framework term here: http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/pubs/MDA.pdf.
It has been a year since I was first shown this picture and told about MDA.

And only during my summer of the reflecting bonanza have I started to come to some terms with it. Still, I have my own interpretation of MDA. And I can say that during the year of development I have never thought of MDA actively while developing. […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.3: my two cents on the topic of design.

In part 3.2 I tried to explain the role the game designer. But it is also true that while some of us are always game designers, while some of us are occasionally game designers, all of us are just designers at all times (in game development). If the sense of design is just the ability to recognize and create a pattern (my interpretation) then this is a common human trait and even more so in people who are artists. By […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.2: But aren’t we all game designers? Yes and no, most of the time – no.

Here it comes, the most interesting part of my monologue. The question of who are the game designers to me and why most of us, students, aren’t game designers when we are working in a group. As I have already pointed out, game designers as a title were avoided like the plague in the descriptions of the courses. Furthermore, all branches are called Game Design. Yet the role of a game designer is a specific role in the group.
So, are […]

1-year milestone. Part 3.1: Why did game designers get robbed of their title?

1-milestone. Part 3.1: Why were the game designers robbed of their title?
Finally, the part of this blog that I looked forward to most. And while I thought to start this part of discussing the game designers a bit differently, the fates decided otherwise.  Someone might have mentioned this in our designer class discussions, but I have no memory of this. Perhaps I will make a fool out of myself, but I feel that this is an important observation which needs […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.5: After the project ends.

This is a small post with only a couple of thoughts that I had a hard time placing anywhere else specifically. I decided to just make a separate post for them because I associate them with the end of a production cycle. If there are things that you get to experience or notice when you ended a project, then please share!
 
Over-burn and the price you pay. There are many talented individuals who do other things besides studying game development. And […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.4 Imposter syndrome or an imposter?

You probably have heard of a saying “Fake it till you make it”. This saying is about something called Imposter Syndrome.
Here is a wiki link for a quick reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
I also remember this expression sticking with me after a certain TED talk, so go check it out too, if you haven’t seen it:
https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are
If you are too lazy to deal with any of this, then here is the bottom line – when you deliver what is expected of you, […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.3: Causes of the group disharmony.

So, what is the point of this section? I know that the motto of our education is “Fail fast and fail a lot”. But I personally prefer fair warnings about where I might fail so that may I pay attention to these queues, rather than stumble blindly around in the darkness. A lot of these things, if not all, can be predicted and foreseen. So instead of failing at the basic stuff, I would have preferred to avoid the potentially […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.2: Detection of the group disharmony.

This part is dedicated to something I was both unfortunate and fortunate to experience during my second project which is, as the title states, a group disharmony. You can also call this simply an unhealthy working environment. In retrospective, I realise that there were many things that I could have done about this situation, but I choose not to act or dismissed my thought as a product of a coincidence. This is the type of a failure that the teachers […]

1-year milestone. Part 2.1: Teamwork and the good stuff.

In this second part of my notes, I’m moving onto the territory of the interaction between us, the students and the team members, on a much more intimate level. As you can imagine, working with the same people for 8 weeks on a small project creates dynamics that are much different from the interactions of a big group of people. I’m going to tell about my impressions of the things that create a positive working environment or as I call […]

One year mark. Part 1.3. Student interactions on the “big” scale.

I must say, that I didn’t think I will be able to even get this far in my train of thought, but it does feel good to continue making notes on my experiences. Okay, onward! This part is about us interacting with each other on a scale of around 100 people in the same lecturing room. I have never participated in an activity that would constantly maintain an amount of people that big (my personal record would be 30 people […]