Week 1: Team Building and Ideation
This week we are very much in the forming and storming stage of our project. My fellow UX designer and I agreed we would also carry out our own weekly catch-ups, to go over our roles in the process. We use Google Meet to have an hour long catch up on webcam. We both felt fairly confident about what skills we could bring to the game prototype development, but could see some ideas offered more UX investment over others (e.g narrative-based games over arcade). We decided to bring up these concerns at our next group catch up.
Later that evening, we met as a group for the second time. We had carried out our rapid ideation activities and voted on each others ideas. We once again had an agenda for this meeting to ensure we went over the main topics of discussion. At this stage we were mostly concerned with creating a project management plan. We formalised the tools we would employ for different aspects, e.g. GitHub as a repository with Google Drive for LFS, Figma would be used for mood-boarding and ideation, we would use G-Suite for calendars and weekly meetings, and at this stage we would continue to use our group discord channel for weekly meetings. We also looked at group and individual schedules, to allow our work to fit around our other commitments. We decided to continue with weekly meetings at this stage, with a view to increasing this at peak workload times. We also set a time for our supervisor meetings which will happen fortnightly.
We talked about the most liked ideas, with each person elaborating on their own ideas. We created moodboards for the top 5 ideas in Figma with a view to each of us individually adding inspiration, links, images and videos to each idea. We also decided that we would each carry out mind mapping and SCAMPER techniques to further develop each idea. This would be done in our own time to allow the meetings to focus on discussion.
I felt at this point it was worth re-iterating that this is primarily a team working project. We should harness our repertoire of skills, particularly in game development, to create a fully-formed prototype that both fell comfortably within the marking rubric, as well as pushing us creatively. I intend to personally monitor our performance periodically to ensure we keep on track. It is crucial that our approach to this project must be supported by research, and we should be willing to review our approaches and plan our schedules carefully along the way.
We were asked to come up with a team name, and each of us put a suggestion forward. In this meeting we mutually agreed on the name Pandamoneum, a reference to the Panda icon our team was originally assigned on Discord. It also aligned with our mutual aim to creative explore ways to offer innovation and disrupt the expected norm by delivering a cute, but violent game.
Following our earlier catch up, Hanni and I discussed our UX thoughts with the rest of the group and were reassured that there was a lot of UX involvement throughout the project, even with non-narrative based games. Every user action has to be very satisfying, it must be fully accessible, A-B tested and researched. We will be the architects who decide what this game should look like, honing in on replayability, and then instructing the game developers to deliver.
It was agreed that a narrative-based game would rely more heavily on UX, and this was likely to need amendments each week as the development takes shape. This was deemed to be higher pressure. We only had one narrative-based game idea but we don’t intend to rule this out, but may take elements from this idea to allow one of our other ideas to hit the replayability brief.