GDO730 Co-Creative Design and Development Practice - Week 3 - Planning
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Figure 1: Storming Illustration (Nasike Lababan, 2022)
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This week embraces the conflict, as well as celebrating adversity, heading deep into the world of Tuckerman’s ‘storming’. With teamwork, come the members who try their hardest to avoid even an ounce of threat that leads to conflict, where others seek and relish in confrontation. This tends to differentiate those that can maintain control in a situation and those that start to lose their collaborative grip. A lot of team formation can feel like this is due to the mixture of personality, opinion and culture which starts to fracture the heart of a team’s cohesion. With the right tools and techniques, conflict can be caught at the start of the cracks and be reduced by counteracting with the level of team coordination and discipline.
My goals for the week are somewhat restricted due to my other commitment resubmitting my previous module prototype. I intended to create a balance at the start of this group module as every will be dependent on each other with both the work and availability. Fortunately, I notified the team during our first SCRUM to ensure that I would be more available after the 30th June due to the deadline. This ensured my efforts would not clash between both workloads which in a sense, prevented a potential conflict. If I were to agree to certain level of allocated work, but only to delay and fail meeting expected milestones that were agreed with the rest of the group.
I intended to take on potential roles in programming and design as these would be core areas of development that I believe that I wanted to concentrate on and achieve further experience, specifically scripting. At this point in the project, we were still storming, but using innovation techniques to assist in what kind of game we would like to develop. Something to meet both the criteria of a replayable core loop and a uniquely engaging game to harness our own skills whilst being proud of our own product. I have also decided to reduce my content on my blogs due to the extensive amount that has gone into them in the past, following a structure to discuss and elaborate on the key elements of each week.
This will limit my time to allocate any reading material as I am restricted with the level of research I can contribute. That does not mean I will not adhere to necessary sources that assist in my writing, but to cut the optional reading lists out and make it a priority to carry out the weekly activities and reflect on my actions.
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Reflect and Discuss
This week’s spark forum encourages us among all the negativity in teamwork, to outline and share positive anecdotes about conflict resolution. In a summary of 250 words, we must write an experienced time where we effectively resolved conflict using the 5W1H method.
Who?
It was my final year of my undergraduate studies where we were tasked to developing a Zelda-like game under the size of 50KBs, as a 20-man indie studio. The team was divided into various departments of industry. I stepped up to become the lead of the design department, which myself and other leads were drawn into the conflict of one individual within the QA team responsible for platforms and optimisation.
What?
This was a very in-depth conflict from the QA members perspective. They raised this by outlining their issues and points through a formal letter to all leads of the studio including myself. This letter however was more personally opinionated than from a professional view. Not to mention the levels of tiredness and frustration each team were feeling from the current conditions of the game. I also encountered a personal confrontation from this individual regarding their opinions and subtle mocking towards the acting design department, not fully knowing how to construct a game design document effectively and professionally.
When?
This conflict took place during launch of our game, triggering the end of the production phase. Our lecturer who was acting as senior producer, scheduled a meeting to resolve this conflict which take up to 2 hours of communication. My personal confrontation was encountered during the pre-production phase where we initially started the necessary documentation for the game.
Where?
This took place during my undergraduate studies at Solent University where I was the acting lead for the design department, as well as the worldbuilder responsible for the story, character, and world elements of our game.
Why?
It is quite confusing where the origins of this conflict occurred. This individual’s methods of being practical was hard to comprehend and caused a barrier between other team members way of thinking. This was a first time experiencing what it would be like to work for a game company, whether it wasn’t to industry standards, this was still a great opportunity. The hardest milestone was production as we resulted in publishing a very buggy but playable gam, which went over the limit of 50kbs.
How?
Our lecturer involved everyone in the conflict and sat all the leads down in front of the team to draw up everything that would eventually lead to a resolve. It was not the one that we all hoped such as apologies, but we stuck to our goals and ensured to pursue a improved game in the post-production phase. My individual conflict was resolved by sending a formal message to the QA member, outlining our current levels of knowledge and expertise and reciprocate that we are only students having a first-hand enjoyable experience to become familiar with large-scale group work. I said my peace in a professional and courteous manner as this was something to clear the air before a storm of conflict occurred. I was given a response back with fragments of apology, which was suitable enough to move on and continue the work cooperatively.
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Embracing Conflict
This weeks reading material discusses the dysfunctions of teams, demonstrated through a variation of models, to monitor and improve team morale and a groups direction effectively. These models originated from american author Patrick Lencioni (2002). To link up with the previous section regarding conflict, I thought it best to review the conflict resolution model, designed to assist teams in removing extraneous obstacles and search for a the more-thorough and unattended issues.
Figure 2: Conflict Resolution Model (Patrick Lencioni, 2002)
In order to get to the core of the conflict, it must first be embraced by the team commiting trust between one another, even though alot of the time it is not a simple challenge that causes uncertainty and the acception that there is a problem within the group that needs to be raised. One this is achieved, there a multiple ways how to embrace the conflict. One for instance in how I would approach is scheduling conflict. This approach enables you to face the problem directly and take priority over the work to rule out where the problem started. Say the style in how the structure of the team has been designed or the differentation of skills between members creates uneasiness.. Once the core issues have been outlined, only then will you reach the core of issue defintion.
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Figure 3: Dr Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats Diagram (Kevin May, 2022)
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This weeks activity is mixed between how we as individuals, or as a whole team carry out decision making. Dr Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats technique is designed to simplify and encourage teams to attempt different views as part of the process of decision making. Each coloured hat is referenced as a different view. This activity was something each member of our group were willing to attempt, only that we fortunately began with a strong hold on decision making. We scheduled our SCRUM meetings every wednesday to discuss the weekly tasks, the teams current attitude toward the workload and draw up plans for supporting each other on areas where we might struggle due to skills and availabality.
I feel we have a strong workflow when it comes to communicating and collaboration as a team, only when it comes to the individual perspective, it tends to be unclear, especially in myself whether the I doubt whether or not my level of contribution is balanced, only to attempt applying it effectively to the set milestones we intend to meet and not cause delays. Conflict itself has been at low barrier since the start of the project and with our strengths in communication and organisation, I feel we are on track with our process of decision making and hope to stick to our goals.
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Ideation Techniques
This week also involved working from the case study research from my last post and finalising an ideation towards our digital prototype. The team shared and compared ideas over the discord channel in what we wanted to develop and which idea would be the ideal candidate. I drew up some ideas using the ideation technique of brainstorming, which broke down two potential ideations in the form of the mindmap technique.
Brainstorming Technique
Figure 4: Replayable Core Loop Ideas Brainstorm (Kyle Cornwell, 2022)
Mindmap Technique
Figure 5: Ideation 1 Mindmap (Kyle Cornwell, 2022)
Figure 6: Ideation 2 Mindmap (Kyle Cornwell, 2022)
From using both these techniques, it enabled me to get a stronger idea in what our game could potentially developed into. I considered my first ideation to be less effective due to our core persona that comes from a business-related background, which would not be an ideal destresser during their free time. Plus the variety of art styles that would go into this could potentially be overwhelming in terms of design. I was happy with my second ideation since there is so much to be added or taken away with an RTS-like game which is popular with mobile gamers, especially casual gamers.
I was late with my ideation research when it came to our second SCRUM meeting, but I was able to share my results with the rest of the team who had similar ideations on terms of functionality and choice of platforms. At this point, we decided to combine some ideas and work on rescheduling a meeting to finalise which ideation worked best with everyone. The direction the ideation was heading so far was an addictive mobile game, which is a good start to narrow down the platform to develop for, as well as sticking to our replayable core loop criteria for the project brief.
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Reflection
Looking back at this week, it has been very productive both with the group and my own individual work. I enjoyed learning more about conflict since my previous experience in grou work, as mentioned in the reflect and discuss section, was not the best and given that it has only been a couple of weeks into the module, Our team is at a strong point with where the project is heading. Finalising an idea will enable us to start preparing for our pitch documents as part of the criteria as if we were to show this to a potential publisher or investor.
I did feel quite out of sync with the group, especially when it came to ideation planning as at the time I was away from my PC due to my full-time job taking priority, which unfortunately affected my originally allocated time to come up with some ideas. I did however stay up to date over Discord to get some inspirations from the other team members since my brain was not as motivated during the late evenings. I hope to improve on this by feeling more in loop with the work and be able to share my thoughts not so late because this may affect how we plan to make decisions in future, especially when approaching a playable build of the game.
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