Day Three

I was absent on day three. But here's a nice video to distract you from that:

Day Two

We were given the task of creating a product for the Tate. During the lesson we focused on who we were selling this product to. We had to come up with a single person and flesh them out. In an experiential learning cycle, this would be the abstract conceptualisation part.

Our group came up with a 30 something mom who is looking to get something for her young son. She wants the product to be both fun and educational. I think we could have fleshed out our character a bit more during the lesson. This would have given us a better understanding of what she would want to buy.

Then we had the other groups suggest things that already existed that might be suitable, and they came up with things such as pictionary and scrabble. This gave us some ideas for products that we could come up with.

Day One

On the first day we were put into two groups. We were each given 5 post-it notes on which we had to write an aspect of our every day lives that could be in a game. This was a bit tricky seeing as how I don't really so anything. "Laying in bed all day" didn't really seem like a viable option. I did manage to come up with some after a while:

- Travel (This is the first thing that came to my mind. I had just gotten back from Finland two days ago. The airline lost my luggage and I hadn't recieved it yet. I really hate airports. And planes... I don't want to think about how much time I spent in airports in 2009.)

- Drawing for yourself vs for money (This is a big issue in my life. Usually I don't draw for myself, it's for people online that ask me to draw them something. It's how I earn virtual credits for whatever new online game I find. This leaves me with no time for my own character design or experimentation.)

- Getting on the tube (Have you ever tried getting on the tube at 9.00 at King's Cross? On any typical day I would have to wait for at least 2 trains to go by because there isn't enough space for me to get on.)

- Trying to get money and never having any (No job = no money = no new shoes = no happiness.)

- Sex and all the problems it brings (Having sex and not having sex. Both those situations bring so. many. problems.)

When everyone had written their post its we had to categorise them into groups. Then we had to come up with a game idea based on the post its and re categorise them based on that. We cam up with a pretty solid game idea based on these post its:

-Sleeping during rainy days
-Dreaming
-Walking

The game is about some insomniac who can only fall asleep when it is raining. The player gets to walk around in his dreams. The player is tossed out of the dream when the rain stops.

I think this game has a lot of potential. Character and monster design can do whatever they want, there is a lot of range for creativity.

We named out team "Team Awesome" because clearly we are just that.