TRANSCRIPT Hello! My name is Aaron Wise & this is my personal case study video for the indie game development course at Falmouth University.
In this video I describe my development for the module & ways I feel I will be using the content that I have learned in my everyday work practice & fully developed games going forward.
The reason I joined the course was because earlier last year I had met 2 indie game developers who were making some really awesome games & experiences that I had not seen before in video games.
These two people Matt Reeves & Vidas Salavejus became very good friends of mine and were pretty much the driving force behind a career change.
At this point I had been doing game development for about 5 months and had just entered my first game jam game to put what I had learnt to the test.
The game lasted 1 week and came in 1st place for the hosts choice award.
The success of this game & having several high profile youtubers play my game pretty much got me noticed quite quickly, and by this point, I had the game development bug & I wasn't going to stop learning.
The course started in January of this year & in that time we completed 2 rapid ideation sessions which taught me a lot about the time scales & things to consider when making forms of rapid ideation. Such as what a prototype should actually be. What sort of mechanics do I want to have, and to not get too bogged down with the visual side of things. During this time, I also had an opportunity to reflect on my my progress & my future aspirations.
The way I have overcome this is by using some of the free courses available to us since becoming a student at Falmouth. I am constantly browsing LinkedIn learning and looking for instructional videos that I can learn from. In addition to the 20+ hours I put in at Falmouth studies, I put in an additional 3 to 5 hours in Linkedin learning to help with my learning. Other things I have used to help with this are some of the apps I never knew existed like Trello, & lucid, which is a sort of visual brainstorming creation tool.
With my first rapid ideation session at Falmouth University it went pretty smoothly. I managed to convey the theme quite quickly and really enjoyed making it. The theme was that of around a goddess of balance, a statue with a sword and scales. The image was on a card so I incorporated a tarot mechanic into the game where it gave you an insight on what was going to happen in the game & it was down to you to try & stop it.
In the second rapid Ideation setting, the theme was set around social issues, like healthcare and the environment. I chose to create an RPG game based off of the healthcare crisis of depression. Since the last session went so smoothly, I decided to create this game in Unity. I was sort of familiar with as I had previously made a game in unity but struggled when it came to coding in C#. I used the systems such as Trello and a Kanban board to stay on tasks and evenly split my time on completing the other weekly reading tasks, updating my journal on my website and making the game.
By the end of the two weeks, it was evident that Unity wasn't the engine for me. Whilst I had made some progress, such as combat, dialogue system & moving between worlds via teleportation. There was still much of the game that needed work. The character could move but my stats system, inventory & projectile weapons that I wanted to implement just didn't work.
My overall challenge in this module has been finding the time to be a husband and also be a parent to my 3 kids, finding time to read on the weekly reading material & also make my personal projects as currently a way that provides extra money to the household. Because of this I have resorted to buying several of the books that have been mentioned during the course such as Search inside yourself by Chade-Meng Tan & essential scrum by Kenneth S Rubin.
In summary, my work at Falmouth university has not only allowed me to better myself for future career choices, but it has also helped me personally.
As Chade-Meng Tan says in the book "Search inside yourself" In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness”.
Thank you very much for watching.
REFERENCES
Reeves, M., 2021. What is nemeses?. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if4oJuyGYxE> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
Salavejus, V., 2021. Timore Inferno Trailer. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM4CZTdikOI> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
TBF Games, 2020. What is that Trailer. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Kv00Q_Sbo> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
Wise, A., 2021. My journey Begins. [online] Trialbyfir3.wixsite.com. Available at: <https://trialbyfir3.wixsite.com/tbfgames> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
Linkedin.com. 2021. LinkedIn Learning: Online Courses for Creative, Technology, Business Skills. [online] Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/learning> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
Trello.com. 2021. Trello. [online] Available at: <https://trello.com/en-GB> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
Lucid.app. 2021. Log in. [online] Available at: <https://lucid.app/> [Accessed 21 April 2021].
Tan, C., 2014. Search inside yourself. 15th ed. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, p.47. "In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness"
Picture of Goddess of Balance/The Fool Card/Robot Cowboy/Western Town with Neon sign, all belong to Aaron Wise
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