GDD710 Development Practice Module - Week 9 - Development
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This week has been very workload heavy regarding Rapid Ideation 2, as well as the topic Communities of Practice. It sense some humour in this area as being an indie games developer would invole constant networking with potential publishers and user audiences. The experiences are void to me due to my short-duration of being a self-employment as a developer. The closest encounter would be the hosting of Game Jams and responding regularly on the forum towards my set deadline. A similar experience comprised of joining a discord server for Unity Game help which I found to be quite dull and out of sync due to my level of expertise. If I had not jumped from a BSc to an MA, this would be a very different blog. This will still make an interesting discussion to my posts as an instant reflection to look back on.
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What is Communities of Practice?
The term "Communites of Practice" is quite self-explanatory. it is a mixture of individuals that converse with similar issues and struggles on a similar level, drawing them into a cohort where they set solo and collective goals. The main concentration here is comparing the strongest practices and constructing newer understandings that proceeds into the professional practices domain. It is designed to improve organisational performance within businesses such as government agencies to car manufacturers (Etienne C. Wenger, 2000). To ensure a full Community of Practice, there must be three distinct traits involved.
"Practice is a shared history of learning. Practice is conversational. Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern (domain) or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better (practice) as they interact regularly (community)." - Ettiene C. Wenger, 2000)
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Domain, Community & Practice
Figure 1: Communities of Practice Illustration (CDC, 2015)
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1. Domain - The shared interest that provides incentive and passion for a group of similar people to come together. A scope is agreed upon by the CoP group. This ensures the full attention to the significance of the community.
2. Community - The group of people that come together with similar goals and interests, sharing their knowledge between eachother. The collaboration is initialised and purpose is created.
3. Practice - The agreed upon methods of grouping and executing the collectively developed knowledge and techniques that improve the community mission. This involves implementation of new technologies or the best course of practice, innovation and problem-solving.
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Ethnography Report On Discord
This weeks challenge has lead me to reminisce on familiar software that aids me during development . The goal is ot outline a community of pracitioners that alligns my interests an aspirations towards the future, followed by a n Ethnography report. My Ethnography weapon of choice is none other than the nerd-central community of Discord (Hammer & Chisel, 2015). I never really comprehended the purpose of an online community aside from the general help forums for minor errors who may or may not respond until I studied a BTEC in Digital Industries at college over 5 years ago. That is when I joined my digital cohort of Discord. Initially it was used just for keeping in contact with my former college students, until I reached undergraduate studies and explored the potential in Discord I never considered to adventure into.
Tone & Language - It was certainly someting complex to get into in terms of language as as if I accidentally pressed a "developer mode" and everything was all over the virtual shop. As studies went by I understood the main concept of discord as an all out community for any technical purpose out there. It was familiar interacting with general emoticon, as well as GIF settings that could be altered to your own amusement that can be shared with other members on direct home pages or joined/hosted servers. It felt like fancy chat room calling it a "server" which would make logical sense. Once I understood how the language worked, I picked up the same style when communicating with peers over multiple servers. Layout of language is very visual such as using text based or imagery to make communication less cluttered.
Activities & Behaviours - Discords countless use of activities make it an inspirational community, consisting of indie game developers like myself, user experience designers and countless other software-based individuals worldwide. No matter what server you are connected to or group chat you've been invited on, there is always someone to talk to due to such a friendly and social ladder. Whether it be a project related matter or general discussions on the current industry, you can always count on Discord for activity. Behaviours display quite a recursive array of communication when a topic is thrown on the server. Usually when important notes such as online game jams are announced, is when the chaotic flow of notifications will start to appear on my phone. I tend to only respond to relevant messages as my main selection of peers I share my content with are the main community I collaborate with.
Types of Interaction - Discords syntax has a freely-opened interface where you can select between professional programmer and vague software student. It's sole design is all digital based. A strong advantag using Discord is you can synchronize other social media accounts to your profile sucha s Yotube, Twtich, Github and Xbox to explore a broader community through gaming platforms and version control software. My personal favourite interaction when using Discord is the voice channels. All you need is a connected Microphone and you can jump into a voice chat, connect third-party music and share content with peers over the share screen functions. As I am quite a visual person, It really makes a difference when sharing work over such a simple drop in and out tool that works over mobile, as well as PC. Even though the communities can be larger than others, I tend to keep a minimal tolerance in what servers I have joined that assists in my work.
Patterns & Rules - The overall community of Discord has a rule book for their rules and regulations when using the software. Their guidelines are to a sensible and fair degree. The main rules clearly state about respect, appropriateness for all ages regarding language and content which is standard and important to accept their terms and conditions whilst in use. it is hard to describe patterns as Discord has a mixture of communities that commit to the same rules and regulations (Aldo de Moor, 2005). It is all dependent on the sole purpose of a server with what the admin has selected to allow and disregard.
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Rapid Ideation 2 Theme
This week was also the wrapup of Rapid Ideation 2/Game Jam 2 and by far was this a difficult one for me personally. Not neccessarily what I wanted to develop but the time I had to apply development.
The theme this time was to create a prototype that solves a problem in our everyday life. You may consider working in a team of 2 to increase the experience and enjoyment. This my brain melt for the first couple of days of the 2 week set deadline as something sounding so simple is much more complex in a theoretical sense. I was considering to work with another student, but I felt that my other commitments outside my studies would effect the schedule and I felt that I would become a liability. I decided to go it alone once again to see what I could put together. Once an idea finally appeared, there was one specific life-long problem that I was so sure many others would agree with, and that is batteries!
The amount of times we've all hit rock-bottom when needing to change batteries if a clock or controller, but it is always at an inconvenience when you realise you've only got triple As and you need Double As that are nowhere to be seen in the draw. Or when you wanted to do something fun and innovative like myself going on VR, but due to the period of time that has passed since the last session, the hand controllers are dead and will need up to an hour and a half to have an effective amount of power to use properly. By that point after setting all the cables up, I have gone off the idea in wanting to play VR, only to disassemble it and be annoyed at my effortless actions for the rest of the day. Maybe I am reading into this abit too much. This has happened on multipe occasions.
It was at that moment when my idea came into play where I wanted to develop a mini timer game where the goal is to restore all the power to lamposts in a town before the sun comes up. This would make logical sense as why would you need lamposts active during the daytime? The one problem I wanted to add was another problem ontop of the orignal problem. This would consist of a usable torch that can be used to searchd for the broken lamposts. Sounds like a breeze right? The only PROBLEM is when using the torch, the battery power drains so you have to constantly keep adding batteries over a period of time. This would only occurr when the torch is in use. Once I had my idea set in motion, I felt in a stronger position to carry out the Rapid Ideation to some potential. i already made the Github repository when the Rapid Ideation commenced during my week 7 blog This is where I followed a similar approach with my text-based game and attempted some designs. Below is an illustration of my Rapid Ideation 2 Mockups.
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Mockups
Figure 2: Rapid Ideation 2 Mockups (Kyle Cornwell, 2021)
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As you can see from above. I have designed a simple town structure to represent the map where the game will take place as the scope is considered reasonable. I will implement a range of lamposts around the town using a city asset pack from the Unity Asset Store (Unity, 2004). I would have modelled the torch asset myself but due to development time I had to source this light sourcr from the asset store also. The visuals of the game would be a first person camera with the torch displayed at a distance as your companion, followed by a mini map to verify your current location. I thought it would be a cool, yet simple feature to add as you have two senses of direction, ignore the map and explore the town, or pinpoint your precise location to help find the broken lamposts quicker. There would be raycast mechanic when the camera interacts with a lampost asset, it would highlight "Click to Fix Lampost" by clicking the left mouse button.
This would trigger a light source to activate from that precise lampost, indicating it has been repaired. The torch mechanics would function by pressing the space bar to toggle the torch with an on/off state. Each time the torch is turned on, the intensity level decreases on the light source to indicate that the battery power is draining. This is easily resolved by pressing the E key to add a battery into the power slot. I aim to have a total of 4 batteries in the torch to give a fair amount before having to change the batteries each time. Every time battery is added, the intensity level icreases by one to have a realistic brigthness on the torch. All of this sounds quite simple for such a fustrating real-world problem, it just all depends on the time I have to piece ths project together to a working standard.
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Lights On
Figure 3: Lights On (Kyle Cornwell, 2021)
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Personal Thoughts on Lights On
This Rapid Ideation was a disappointing turnout from my perspective. The initial concept was there, only my enemy of time has prevented me from completed this just about working prototype. This was all down to my current full time job having a heavy week during the peak of summer, which as you can imagine quite hectic and not to say there is no excuse on my behalf, only that these priorities came first in order to fit even this amount of contribution in. I still enjoyed working on the movement and torch mechanicd as I was finally interacting more in Unity which I haven't done since my reverse engineering of Zelda. I noticed in myelf, quite alot of logical thinking when carrying out the area of the project that I managed to complete. For instance, the torch mechanics made sense once I did some research and discovered a Youtube video for a simple interactable torch, as well as standard first-person movement by none other than the faithful Brackeys.
It felt positive to have a refresher with familair code, only the negative impact of my time management creeping up on me for a second time in the module. Nevertheless, this prototype has potential to continue developing upon. If only I managed to finish the minimal level design, timer and lampost mechanics. That would have given me some more satisfaction knowing I had the prototype closer to a much more playable state instead of ending up with a walking camera with a pointing torch. I would still consider meeting my goals through any free moment or ounce of programming to maintain my increase in scripting skills. The strongest outcome to see was no matter how much I got completed, there is still room for development that could be polished if carried as a proper project that follows a progressive schedule. I have to say that my time researching has improved greatly over this module so far and only hope to grow increasingly.
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References
Etienne C. Wenger, 2000. Communities of Practice: The Organisational Frontier. [Online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2000/01/communities-of-practice-the-organizational-frontier [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
Discord, 2015, Hammer & Chisel. [Online] Available at: https://discord.com/ [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
Discord, 2020. Discord Community Guidleines. [Online] Available at: https://discord.com/guidelines [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
Aldo de Moor, 2005. Communication Pattern Analysis in Communities of Practice. [Online] Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228952528_Communication_Pattern_Analysis_in_Communities_of_Practice [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
Kyle Cornwell, 2021. Version Control. [Online] Available at: https://www.kylecornwell.com/post/version-control [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
255 Pixel Studios, 2018. Simple City pack plain. [Online] Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/urban/simple-city-pack-plain-100348 [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
PIXELBURNER, 2017. Flashlight. [Online] Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/electronics/flashlight-18972 [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
Kyle Cornwell, 2021. Reverse Engineering Zelda. [Online] Available at: https://www.kylecornwell.com/post/reverse-engineering-zelda-tbc [Last Accessed 24/08/2021]
Cor Games, 2020. Unity3D: Create a Flashlight/Torch Battery System. [Last Viewed 24/08/2021] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq1T4qezGh8
Brackeys, 2019. FIRST PERSON MOVEMENT in Unity - FPS Controller. [Las Viewed 24/08/2021] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QajrabyTJc&t=1s
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