GDO730 Co-Creative Design and Development Practice - Week 4 - Development
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Figure 1: Pitching Illustration (Sarah Goff-Dupont, 2020)
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This week takes place at the core of a theatre, as we focus on presenting towards an audience. When it comes to sharing ideas or concepts, this is something that the majority of creative people will experience throughout their career. The majority of a pitch's success is measured by its delivery. Some find it easier than others when it comes to presentations. You have those destined to take the situations under their wing and thrive in the spotlight, where the other tends to panic and distress even before taking the stage, unable to perform and appeal towards their audience.
Pitching can be a challenging and complex area to overcome. But it is something that can be comprehended through adaptation in how the mind processes an audience through public speaking, storytelling and branding, which may potentially lead to a negative experience. This will trigger how to achieve further and improve upon pitching techniques. This weeks's goals for me have been quite restricting due to my resubmission deadline for IGO720 Game Development coming to a close. The deadline is due 30th June, which has already been mentioned to the team in advance, preventing me to carry out tasks effectively.
Our main discussions for this week were regarding the finalised idea in what we want to develop for our game. The two candidates were between a theme generator game and a knight/arena type game. I ended up being the deciding vote due to outlining which idea was more appealing, as well as taking into account our skills, scope and time we had to create this game. I settled with the arena game which as mentoned in my last post, was leaning towards to a mobile game which sets the bars for engaging and addicitve from our core persona and competitor research analysis. I felt that this was the right direction to head as did the team, since the chosen art style being Cottagecore gives a new and innovative way in stylising this kind of game, without the clichés of mobile combat.
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Performance Sharing
This weeks spark forum is all about presentation. We are encouraged to share what we think makes a 'great performance'. Performances are usually associated to widen the scope beyond the generics of public speaking. It is our choice what we wish to define as a striking or beneficial performance through live music, stand up comedy or even the most basic public-speaking presentation out there. I went for a combination of both music and comedy, as this performance is something I can relate to in terms of aspiration and significance.
Figure 2: Nick Helm | Russell Howard's Good News | Full Clip (Avalon Comedy, 2014)
I chose this mixed performance of Nick Helm's standup comedy on the late BBC Thee show, Russell Howard's Good News due to its collection of methods when interacting with a live audience. One being a musician gives that confidence to perform through music, where the other becomes improvised from the list of terrible jokes, to bringing up his own personal topics that trigger the crowd to laugh from how it is projected. Nick's tone is quite deep and pumped full of energy like he already played a live set before coming onto this stage.
His character at the start opens in a welcoming and loud manner to focus the crowds attention, which then twists when picking up his guitar and the first lines going "This is a song". The audience like Nick's songs, were kept in key through his eye contact, individual conversations and the overall delivery of his pitch to make everyone laugh with anything and everything. I believe this was like no standup I've ever watched on this show which is a personal favourite and I think this enabled the comedian to go further as they established a 3-series comedy starring themselves as a distant but funnily enough, instrumental uncle, embarked on a guardianship role to teach his nephew how to live life in all the wrong but humerously right ways.
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The Concept Shed
This weeks course material educates us with Sam Lanyon, the technology and design director of Concept Shed Ltd. Sam pitched and showcased a previous investment to the business world of Dragons Den, as well as Radio 4. During his time attempting to deliver his product to the dragons, the overall investment was not the product, but Sam himself with his keen approaches and accepted him as the investable individual he proved to be. During the Radio 4 interview, Sam discusses about how pitching feels when it first hits you.
This could be during the formal pitch where you feel alot of distress and everything is going to go the opposite, or the preparations that you make to overcome those fears. His best advice is to not take it too severly as this causes a mixture of emotion that does not benefit reaching what you want to achieve in terms of delivering to peers and investors. I consider this to be a strong technique to follow, as well as giving some passion in what you are trying to demonstrate, reaching out to your appealing audience whether if the product itself fails like Sam. It truly shows you can walk away with being investable.
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Slide Deck
This weeks activity tasks our group with making preparations on a slide deck for our upcoming pitch due within a few weeks time. We've been advised to review the submission criteria as the pitch slides themselves are classed as academic writing, meaning we must include in-text citations on the slides and recording a reference list at the end of the pitch. This was something that came to our groups core attention. We established a google document which outlined various sections to discuss and as a team, contribute towards each section by the use of a script.
We all decided to assign ourselves some slides that matched our areas of presenting and expertise. This would be followed up by a transcript of our slides to make it clear and conscise when recording each section. This also enabled us to adapt each slide we were responible for by adding relevant content to asssit in explaining upon such as highlighted research or use of graphics. FishCake team member Adam kindly shared our starter sections onto the forum to the other groups for potential feedback from peers on our progress and outcomes.
Figure 3: Team Slide Deck Starter Sections (FishCake, 2022)
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CottageCore Auto Battler
Following up from our SCRUM Meeting #3 as briefly mentioned in the first section, we finally established the finalised our idea for the game we want to develop a combat arena type game as a 'CottageCore Auto Battler. This was by far, the most important meeting to discuss in where we wanted this idea to take us as a group. Team member Carie kindly wrote up the notes to outline the set tasks to achieve by SCRUM Meeting #4. Team member Jack kindly took the role as SCRUM Master to monitor the meetings behaviour and guide where the discussions needed to be mentioned most.
Figure 4: SCRUM Meeting #3 Notes (Carie Ng, 2022)
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Game Design Document
At this point in the project, we also considered contructing a GDD (Game Design Document to ensure that we all understand the idea of the game fully, as well as altering any changes we may need to review when it comes to actual vs potential features for the playable artefact. This also enabled both IGD and UX students to compare tasks and coalesce on neccessary tasks where the other may not understand assist in areas unfamiliar.
Figure 5: CottageCore Auto Battler GDD (FishCake, 2022)
There wasn't much of my own individual contribution for the project this week it was more group-based, aside from my deciding vote on the overall game idea.
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Reflection
This week marks the establishment of a game idea and a major strongpoint within the group as we now have a core focus in where we want the project to take us. I felt mainly positive due to the amount of discussion and progress we have made at this milestone to achieve from all our research, a solid concept to eventually implement into a playable product. This stage finally enables us to open up productive tasks for implementing mechanics within our chosen game engine of Unity and see where the next few weeks take us.
I feel that after this week I will not be as flexible due to the resubmission clashing with this project, so it was important to see the progress through for an idea to be finalised. I plan to keep up to date via our team Discord server and attend the meetings outside of my own schedule where possible and assist in areas where other members are struggling as moral support. Once my resubmission has been completed, I intend to get more involved with the project to make up for my absence.
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