Innovation and Personal Development

Racket

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Allan) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Hey Innovation Blog!

Been doing a lot of innovation research lately, mostly motivated by progress on our proposal for our semester two project.

Oh, I should probably talk about that first! Basically, our groups were tasked a couple of weeks ago to come up with an original, innovative concept for a game. By the end of that session, we had a very rough idea for what we thought was an interesting concept.

Basically, our original plan was to create a game similiar to the sport of tennis. The twist was that as the player hit the ball the game would respond with dynamic sound, lights and art depending on the flow of the game.

We were then tasked to present this idea so we refined it a little bit; made some of the gameplay rules a little more concrete, thought a little more about what was actually possible with the concept, things like that. What we didn't know at this point was that this was intended to have the potential to be a real second semester development project. While that came as a little of a surprise, we were in the fortunate position of having a realistic idea that our whole team was enthusiastic about. Thus it was decided that most of us would work on developing this concept further!

Approaching this with the idea of actually creating it forced us to look at the idea in a lot of different ways. We decided to approach it from a more exhibition focused angle; creating an interactive art exhibit but keeping the racquet based gameplay and elements of "playing" the piece. Instead of having a traditional tennis court, we plan to have an enclosed court similiar to squash. I'll be back later in the week with a better summary of our project, code-named "Racket", but for now, here's some links relevant to both the project and the kind of thing I'd like to do for my innovation project.

http://designingsound.org/2010/09/audio-implementation-greats-8-procedural-audio-now/

There's a ton of information in this article and the links contained within. I haven't even got through half of it yet but I can see it being really useful. Procedural auio is a really interesting concept and I'm definitely considering my research project being something along the lines of "creating procedural audio through gameplay mechanics" or something like that. That's obviously a little vague, I'll hopefully refine those ideas tomorrow at the meeting with Gregor.

Linky links

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Allan) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:49:00 +0000

Sup blog,

I've obviously been a little lax with updating this blog. Sadly, those reasons are because I've been a little lax with my research. However, I have been doing a fair bit here and there.

The first article I'd like to link on here is the following;

http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/24/3538296/data-entry-risk-management-and-tacos-inside-halo-4s-playtest-labs

This almost feels like a continuation of the articles I looked at last year when I was investigating player metrics as a possible dissertation topic. Those were on Halo 3 and the player testing done in that game, but they were nowhere near as detailed as this article which really gives an amazing insight into the effort put in to using this data to improve games. I'd like to go into this article in more detail, and I hope to do so at a later date. Right now though, I've gotta go home and get ready for work!

Adios!

YO YO YO

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Allan) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:51:00 +0000

Hello new blog. You are going to be for my Innovation and Personal Development module, and I shall fill you with links to various things that I find interesting and relate to my discipline! And you will enjoy it...

The purpose of the module is to research things that I find interesting, post and discuss them here, and eventually decide on a topic that I would like to do a research project on. This project is the main focus of the module, and is almost a miniature dissertation in a way.

While I haven't done too much research so far, I've already got an idea about the kind of topics I'd like to look at. Broadly speaking, I'm interested in investigating different level generation techniques. More specific topics within this area could be;

Using player metrics to assist level design
Different techniques used in procedural (randomised) level generation
Artificial intelligence techniques used to assist level design

While this area is similar to the topic of my dissertation, this module gives me the freedom to look at it with fresh eyes and without the technical eye of a programmer. Despite my background I'm not, as far as I know, forced to look at it from a pure programming perspective. That's certainly reassuring.

I'll be back with some links later in the week. For now, get ready for some links Mr Blog!