Week 2
Abstract Our learning objectives for the week were:
Post 1: Meeting 1 - Game mechanics
09/06/2021 We met on the 9th of June, to discuss the final pieces of game mechanics and also kick-off our sprint. I typed up the notes which can be found here.
We discussed things in Discord, and I wanted some decisions so our project could stay on track.
We kicked off with a brainstorm and discussed the following:
Hades like
Combat discussion
Game progression mechanics
Story expansion
Game design
This was great, and we finalised the following points, agreeing the game should be:
2D isometric
Combat Hack and Slash game
Pixel art style for speed
Protagonist Melle and combat
Antagonist Melle only
Build some ML agents interact with the character
Score system can power-up
Kill 'x' amount to enemies to proceed
Gradual difficulty shift, based on previous behaviour
I was impressed with how quickly we progressed, but not being a game designer, I don't know what stage we should be at in week 2.
Linda took us through some Accessibility considerations, UX Research, Moodboards, Designs, Fonts and Character discussion.
After that, we ran sprint planning and pulled in some tickets to the sprint and kicked things off.
The way we planned our capacity was 20 hours of work. But looking at the stage I am at now; I think that has been ambitious. Writing my blog posts and research has taken 10 hours, so I think I'll feed that back to the team at the sprint retrospective.
The tickets I pulled in for me this week were:
Story setting
World setting
Character setting
Post 2: Sprint Ticket - World setting
As part of our pitch to each other, I'd started to create a dystopian world. But I needed to build on that concept and follow the rules that author John Yorke (2014) had advised.
I started to research what society would look like in 2022 and focus on topics that will define our existence. I came across a book called 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (2020) a few years ago, who argues that technology can be used to create a post-scarcity economy of widespread prosperity. Looking at the dawn of agriculture - mass production of food, the Industrial Revolution - easing of labour efforts with the introduction of machinery, to the present day democratisation of information sharing. However, Bastani (2020) fails to account for the impact of climate change.
Bastani (2020) does discuss these important topics that will shape our future society like Automation, Energy, Health, Resources, Food, Human Rights, Equality, Free Speech, Privacy and Rules of Law.
I created a table of these topics and expanded on how I thought they would work in 2022.
Topic | Future state |
Automation | Robotics |
Energy | Wind, solar and atomic energy |
Health | Integrated technology, custom treatments and automation |
Resources | Abundance |
Food | Genetically engineered and plenty full |
Human rights | Suppressed, full of propaganda and controlled |
Equality | Class-based society |
Free Speech | Controlled and suppressed |
Privacy | Non-existent |
Rules of Law | One controlling world government |
This naturally led me to what would people do for work and leisure in 2222?
I had read a book a fews ago called 'Four Futures: Life After Capitalism' by Peter Frase (2016), who explores this very question and imagines what a post-capitalist utopian and dystopian worlds would look like from present society. Frase imagines these four futures:
Communism: Equality and Abundance
Rentism: Hierarchy and Abundance
Socialism: Equality and Scarcity
Exterminism: Hierarchy and Scarcity
It will take me too long to go into all four, but the one that I thought relevant to me was Rentism. Rentism centrally looks at intellectual property and the laws that protect it, about what happens when rigid state powers defend them and reap rents that flow from them.
For example, car ownership is substituted with car rental and sharing. Homeownership is replaced with communal living and rental.
I then looked at the effects of climate change in the future and researched what cities would be immune to rising seas levels. Finally, I came across an article created by the World Economic Forum, which looked at the 50 highest cities in the world (Wallach, 2020).
Out of the 50 cities, 22 of them are national capitals. The countries with the most cities at high elevation were China and Mexico, with eight each. However, after looking into the listed cities, I found Yerevan was one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, founded as Erebuni in the late 4th millennium BCE and a hotbed of technological innovation today.
I combined the proposition of Rentism with a post-scarcity society set in Yerevan and started to build out the details of our dystopian world.
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Draft 2:
2222
At the peak of the information age, Monkii Corporation, a multinational technology company headquartered in Yerevan, Armenia. Distinguishing themselves by making logic circuits using biopolymers.
These microprocessors represented a notable advance in technology as the natural polymers were produced by the cells of living organisms and could be implanted into any biological material.
Technological implants became common. We could replay memories, quickly look up information and download and subscribe to skills.
Unbeknown to society, Monkii smart chips also induced chemical manipulations. Blocking normal sensory input, distorting memories, weakening reason, logic and emotion. This 'top-down' manipulation and dilution of decision making made it easy for them to wiled control. Eroding democracy and the creation of a Single totalitarian State.
References
Bastani, A. (2020). FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM : a manifesto. S.L.: Verso.
Frase, P. (2016). Four futures : life after capitalism. London: New York.
Wallach, O. (2020). These are the 50 highest cities in the world. [online] World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/50-highest-cities-world-sea-level/.
Yorke, J. (2015). Into the woods : a five-act journey into story. New York, Ny: The Overlook Press.
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Post 3: Project Planning
Conscious of the aggressive timeline, I wanted to make sure we were on a schedule, so I decided to plan the project.
To deliver the work on time, I dedicated:
three weeks to finalise the concept
five weeks to finalise and deliver the artwork
four weeks for pre-production work
six weeks for development
two weeks for pre/post-launch
As we had a mid-project presentation to deliver on Week 6, I broke the project down further into stages: Discovery, Design, Develop, Deliver. Design thinking techniques I had used and spoken about before in previous modules.
I then created a detailed worklist in preperation for sprint planning.
The full page can be found here.
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