Special Topics Module 1
Research & Activity Documentation
Mikaela Cadiz
Project 1
Module 1
Our Team, T4H (The Four Horsemen) consists of 4 members in collaborative flexible roles that will work together to ideate, create, and refine our vision.
Project 1 Goals:
Generate project ideas and concepts
Learn more about gaming, its impact, trends, and software
Determine a rough plan for our term-long project
Receive peer feedback to refine our idea
Selected Topic: 3D Design
Our stream for this class is the 3D Design path. We selected this path as we all have motivations to learn more about 3D modeling and programming software and the majority of us share an interest in video games and Game Design. Through this class our goal is to create a fun and engaging game that will introduce us into the field of Game Design as a new area most of us have not fully explored yet. We are excited at the opportunity to create and design within this lens in order to create something we are all proud of and showcases our strengths and ideas as designers.
Throughout Project 1 we stayed mainly within the first two stages of the Double Diamond methodology to generate and refine ideas and concepts for our term-long project, conducting Action Research to discover trends, determine what software to use/learn, and to tighten our overall scope.
Activity 1
Brainstorming & Research
Activity 2
For Activity 2, we explored our inspirations and vision for the project, creating our own personal moodboards of our specific tastes, played games, and wants for the project. The following images were a part of my moodboard.
Workshop 1 - Action Research
This is our action research workshop slide deck. We chose to use the QuestionPro article to gather more information about Action Research, which we summarized in bullet points. We then went into our first steps, and we had gathered links to tutorials to get us started.
As this workshop was dedicated towards Action Research and the first steps of the process, we gathered a lot of insight on the process of action research and ways we can apply it to our project going forward. There are specific stages of action research and the purpose of going through that stage, which are all practices that we seek to implement as we begin learning Unity and creating our low-poly 3D models. This workshop gave us a good starting point—this is our “Plan” stage, as referenced within the article—for the next first steps as we begin our project. It also allows us to properly anticipate the stages or possible pitfalls of our research/activities so as to naturally fall into the flow of doing things, with the freedom to fail, pivot, and create checkpoints. The point is to experiment! This is a beneficial mentality to have going into a project as we proceed into the semester.
Project 1
Project Concept
The final pitch we developed is “Pixel Plateau”, a 3D sandbox game created using Blender, Unity, Aesprite, and Figma. In the game there will be a customizable floating island that you can customize with a wide-variety of different objects, environments, characters, and more. Create your very own island to your liking in a 3D environment of your creation. Save your creation and share it online!
The User Interface will be soft, and paperbook-esque while the overall Art Direction of the game is inspired by low-poly, pixel art games like A Short Hike and Enter the Gungeon.
Explore nostalgic, artistic visuals in a pixelated art style with retro sound design and sprite work.
My Research Reflections
From A1: Successful outcomes: Our group formed due to mutual interest in Game UI and asset creation, so I believe we were successful in narrowing down the *broad* direction of our project. We also came across a lot of fascinating articles to support our use case by researching about our target demographic. Researching into the gaming industry of what is important at the moment (sustainability) is a very good point to consider and integrate into our product. Activity 1 helped us reach a broad conclusion of what we want to do, gave us a starting point, and helped us understand what to consider.
Next steps & potential challenges: We have to figure out our scope for the project and the specifics of what we want to achieve. This includes our visual direction and how far we want to go with it. Right now, we have broad ideas and concepts. It is just a matter of narrowing everything down to a specific concept that we would be able to achieve within the semester!
From A2: Successful Outcomes: Creating a collaborative moodboard was definitely incredibly helpful for keeping us on the same page and understanding what all of us wanted from the project. From the last activity, it’s one thing to have a mutual passion surrounding the same topic, but it’s another to have it laid out. It helped all of us understand the visual direction of our project and the type of mechanics we want our project to have. It also helped us define the fact that we want to create a 3D Biome Sandbox! Since majority of this was conceptualizing, the openness to ideas and exploring different possible visual directions was very freeing and later made it easier to narrow down the specific software we plan on using (like Aseprite, or specific Blender filter settings). Tim’s research for the program we’d be using (Unity, Spline, Unreal Engine) was crucial research to understanding our scope, locking down our main program. The action research workshop kickstarted that process. I am excited to see where we head for this project, as there are a lot of new things to explore.
Next Steps: While we’ve narrowed down our concepts a bit, we now need to flesh out the nitty gritty details (like how many biomes we want to create, how many assets each of us will do, what the branding will be, etc.), but there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge as all four of us aren’t familiar with Unity in the slightest. There has to be a lot of research done on Unity and Blender so we can gage what is possible and what is not before we get ahead of ourselves too much. Getting down basic functionality in Unity and starting to create our models in Blender (especially since Blender can be a huge learning curve for beginners) is essential. Continuing to make proper executive decisions to refine our concept and following our action research plan would be the next best steps.
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