Weekly Report 3 9/3/18 - 9/9/18
The choice of topic for this week’s research assessment was clear: pick a source about general tips and tricks. It is a ubiquitous topic, so there were many sources that were found but not featured in the final assessment. One such article, however, titled “Breaking Into Game Design, Part 1”, offered some advice that stuck out to me. It gives a line from a speech by Neil Gaiman which says, “Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain [...] when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards [...] the mountain.”
There is a game that was released in 2013 by thatgamecompany. Its name is Journey. One look at the cover art for the game will reveal why it is relevant. The game’s goal is simply to walk to the mountain in the distance - no one says why, no one says what is there. The player simply always has the beacon of light atop the hill in their sights, and with slight detours along the way, they take their pilgrimage.
Journey provides a very clear image of what finding my mountain would look like. It is an image of a very evident goal, always in sight even if just in the periphery, constantly there and constantly distant. After the research was done, I spent some time thinking about what exactly this aim should be, at least in the researching stage, and what resulted was a brainstormed list of things: emergent technologies, tools that require C++, programming patterns for game AI, deployment and distribution, etc. These are things for which next week’s search can target.
Beyond the concept of the mountain, there were still other useful facets of advice that came from the backlog of articles that could have composed the assessment this week. Most of them emphasized the importance of consistently creating small games and building a sizable portfolio, or planning well and often and testing well and often. I wish there was a bit more free time available right now for me to block some interval every day dedicated to making something, but since college is in the future, that time will come later. For now, focusing on the mountain is fine with me.
LEVEL CLEAR.