Week 9.1 – 23rd July. 2021
Work Experience
This Week commences with asking us to share our experience of “working in a team with specific industry insight“. I have never had the opportunity to work with a games company, but after everything I have been researching and putting into practice, this is something I am keen to start!
I have even began to experiment with Unity now, using my own art, and some of the props from Unity’s Playground.
I want to learn more about moving the character from a to b, practice increasing the distance that the character travels, with a variety of different moves. But in keeping with my method, Kanban, I am aiming to achieve one thing at a time.
Below is the first time, of putting a whole layout together myself. The only assets that were not my creation was the character, the wooden flooring and log flooring at the bottom of the mountain, the box down stage left, and the staff behind the character.
Development
I found when I first pieced this together, the result of the character moving from the wooden square, (downstage left) to moving up the hill, still didn’t work. However I wanted the staff to fall from the sky, and land in the bush, then a slight particle/magical stars effect would beam off, (highlighting the object, so you know, you need to collect the staff).
1st Problem
The staff landed straight, then flopped to one side and dropped down. I wanted to show it getting stuck in the bush, and lodged at an angle, and I wanted my little character to move towards the staff.
1st Solution
I changed where I placed the 2D collider, and this is how it now plays. I added the 2D capsule collider around the staff, plus made the character follow the target. The staff is now the target.
The below link works on browsers such as Safari, Google Chrome, and can be watched only on mobile phones. Hopefully you can view…
Don’t forget to press the right or left arrow..on your keyboard.
http://www.keepitburningthegame.com/Unity/debbs2/index.html
REALM
In the Article – Embedding Reflection and Learning into Agile Software Development, Babb, Hoda, and Norbjerg introduces a new method called; REALM (Reflective Agile Learning Model). It shows the results from other development practices, in India, New Zealand and USA. They show how we as practitioners could integrate reflective practice in agile software development, the benefits of the method, and ways we can adapt and evolve when applying it to a software team.
- REALM uses reflective practice to develop micro habits for uncovering tacit knowledge among a software development team.
After researching Realm, I understand to be a way of putting a retrospective, and many other agile methods into action, to aid towards the teams growth and development. Also it reminds you, with all agile methods, its key to practice continuously, otherwise the process of producing the artefact becomes the only focus, and reflection is easily forgotten about.
They specifically focus on “Tacit Knowledge“, and find ways to express what is difficult to others to understand such as; personal experiences, insights, and intuition.
Reflection-on-action is the “after-action report” on how repertoire has changed. It’s during reflection-on-action that teams attempt to answer questions regarding what to keep, discard, and modify in repertoire.
(Babb, Hoda, and Norbjerg. 2014)
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Agile Methodology – Kanban
Since starting the Masters in January, once we researched into retrospectives, and agile methodologies, I chose to stick with Kanban.
I have tried to apply the way of thinking throughout my blog, and more so throughout any research and new processes I have learned.
I find retrospectives to be a positive step forwards in any project that I have completed so far, and find it rewarding knowing what you have worked on with the team is being discussed. It either works, has to be removed, or be adjusted, but either way the fact that your teams work is being talked about, makes you feel like, what you are doing as that individual is important, and is significant to the final artefact.
“Good Crunch“
The article The cruel optimism of “good crunch”: How game industry discourses perpetuate unsustainable labor practices is specifically based on Game Developer magazine and Game Developers Conference presentations. It discusses the good and bad crunches that happen through the development of a game, explains what a crunch is, and advises you about careers in game development.
Crunch is a term used to describe periods of extreme workload
(Edholm et al. 2017)
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Their overall goal was to understand how crunch continued, despite growing attention to its costs, assessing the themes of bad crunch and its potential outcomes, before discussing good crunch as a form of cruel optimism.
- Their research aims to encourage developers to aim for a more sustainable and progressive labor practice.
“we found that developers were very aware of the costs of crunch, sharing frequent horror stories of lost weekends, destroyed relationships, and even physical health issues arising from overwork.”
(Cote and Harris. 2021)
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The above quote I can relate to now in our current team, yet we are not working for a company, but for our new project, we needed to produce an artefact within a team, and at the start of this module I did begin to push myself so much through the week and work over the weekends too.
However, I did start to feel unwell and loose my energy for studying. Everything became more of a chore, and I was so stressed that I couldn’t concentrate. Rather than enjoying myself learning new and exciting things, such as; creating a brand new game concept, and how to develop a new artefact for the end product and learn about Pitch Presentations, I was just worrying and progress felt like it was “grinding to a halt“.
I had to take a step back…explain to the leader, then she was gone. (details on week 3)
Though, after this episode, the rest of the team have worked consistently on their own, collaborating continuously together, and bonded as the weeks have passed by. We are now comfortable to say our opinions and reservations out loud, we don’t get offended if it’s not what we want to hear, we accept and move forward in a positive light.
Week 9.2 – 27th July. 2021
Spry Fox – ‘Innovate in your Pants’
From watching the Spry Fox’s video; ‘Innovate in your Pants’ the programmer Andrew Fray, reveals, what it is like to be part of a team, who produces innovative new and exciting games, but with the whole team being completely remote.
He shares his knowledge about creating new artefacts, whilst being in a distributed team, and states that not only is it practical, but it can be rather rewarding.
Games produced by Spryfox…
- Triple Town, a freemium strategy puzzle game with city-building game elements for social networks and mobile devices
- Steambirds, a strategy flying game for mobile devices
- Road Not Taken, a rogue-like puzzle game
- Realm of the Mad God, co-created with Wild Shadow Studios.
Team Comparison – to Spryfox
From my experience so far throughout the co-creative design and development practice module, I can definitely relate to the way the company operates. Firstly by;
- Working within a distributed team.
- Using Google Documents to collaborate (but lots more then 2 pages)
- Using Trello as a way to keep track of what people have done, needs to do, or is working on.
One of the questions we are asked to think about is; “what principles can you apply to your own day-to-day operations?”
For me, the most important principles to apply to the teamwork module are;
1) Communication, as this would greatly improve if, we made more time to video chat often, to build on our relationships.
This is what we have put into practice from one point of view: the team meetings, every Wednesday at 12midday. We usually end up staying past the hour, and chatting about anything else that we could improve in the game.
But on the other hand what Fray means is simply by socialising with each other, which we don’t do, due to our timezone differences and work life responsibility’s.
2) Less paper work, only having a couple of pages each, I feel is definitely enough to show your concept clearly, and is easier to simplify.
We started with so many documents, it made everything complex and I personally didn’t think we needed it at all. Finally after week 4, we narrowed things down, and clarified what was actually helping us, and I simplified the Trello board, and the other team members worked on the remainder documents.
This is what helped us to bond better, because we were finally all on the same page. From this action we have improved with everything we have made so far towards the prototype, and are really pleased with what we have finally achieved.
Week 9.3 – 28th July. 2021
Hi9 & Business Start-Up
Wo king shares his industry experience for tech start ups, he explains that for him sharing the workload is crucial to the teams development to move forward.
They aim to create technology thats easy for everyone of all ages, the user experience/ research is his primary focus.
He states, that it’s important to learn machine learning, on data and algorithms, it helps you to understand how humans learn, and from this we can improve the technology we produce.
“Learn machine learning even if you are not good at maths or good at coding.”
(King. 2021)
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Challenge – Keep Up the Good Work
The list below, shows a few points, how I will avoid crunch by;
- Not working over the minimum time if possible, that I stated on the team charter. (not to burn the candle at both ends)
- Making sure I have clear notes on what I need to discuss with our supervisor and group webinars, over the next few weeks, to be able to get a clear response.
- To continue to do my own research with Unity, in order to understand more about the engine, and not ask.
- To Catch up with my blog, create less stress for myself.
Below is our plan for the end of the module.
References
Babb, J., Hoda, R. and Norbjerg, J. 2014. Embedding Reflection and Learning into Agile Software Development. IEEE Software, 31(4), pp.51-57.
Cote, A. C. and Harris, B. C. (2021). The cruel optimism of “good crunch”: How game industry discourses perpetuate unsustainable labor practices. New Media & Society, p.146. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14614448211014213
Edholm, H., Lidström, M., Steghöfer, J. P. and Burden, H. 2017. Crunch time: The reasons and effects of unpaid overtime in the games industry. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track (ICSE-SEIP), pp. 43-52. IEEE.
Edery, D and Cook, D. 2010. Spry Fox; Innovating In Your Pants – Part 1 Available at : https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-9-spry-fox-innovate-in-your-pants?module_item_id=54740 [Accessed 23/07/2021]
King, W. 2021. Hi9 & Business Start-Up. Available at : https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-9-hi9-and-business-start-up?module_item_id=54742 [Accessed 27/07/2021]
Full List of Figures
Figure 1 : Norton 2021. trees/foliage/mountains/background – added to Unity Playground
RALPHY GETS ANIMATED..? 