To develop my idea, I used a brainstorming technique, which was conceived by Alex Osborn, originally for advertising purposes and outlined in his 1953 book, Applied Imagination.
This technique is informal and favours a quantity of ideas. The informality of this method is intended to produce as many ideas as unfiltered and disinhibited as possible (Mindtools.com. n.d.). The point of brainstorming is not to criticise or even praise ideas but just to get them out in the open (Imindq.com. n.d.). I have chosen to use this method is this project is intended to be done individually. Brainstorming can be done either in a group situation or individually.
There are several other ideation method available such as Round Robin or Crazy 8s, but these are more conducive to group projects as they involve generating solutions to problems collectively.
Not only is Brainstorming suited for solo projects, but it in fact favours these types of projects (Lamm, H. and Trommsdorff, G., 1973). The reason for this is that in group situations, the members of a group pay less attention to the rules of brainstorming and may pay so much attention to other people that they do not generate ideas of their own. When brainstorming solo, I will not have to worry about the opinions and egos of other people in a group and I can ideate without inhibition.
To begin brainstorming, I started by writing and sketching some ideas for concepts, while bearing in mind the problem that I wished to solve which was to improve my scripting skills. Here are a few pages of my brainstorming…
Along with brainstorming, I also searched game development forums to find some basic ideas for a solo game project which could help to address the weaknesses I wanted to fix, as well as a piece of work to remediate.
I came up with two ideas that I really like and stood out. They were as follows:
Curupira: This is a mythological creature from Brazilian folklore, which lives in the rainforests and wreaks havoc on those who take too much from the rainforest. The creature can also spray fire from their hands. I had actually done an animated piece of this character during the last Inktober, which you can view here, but I thought this could make a good game about the Amazon rainforest burning and you play this character who tries to save it and fight those who plunder it.
Arcade game crossover: While searching for ideas for projects that novice game developers could do, I came across tons of forums that suggested making a clone of a classic arcade game which would help me to teach the basics of programming a game.
The main ones that tended to be listed were: Space Invaders, Pong, Super Mario Bros, Snake, Pac Man, Tetris and Asteroids. I also come across this article on gamedev.net about programming development (GameDev.net. n.d), which breaks down what I would learn exactly from coding these games and emphasised the Pong is an especially good game to code first, given how simple it is.
I eventually decided to go ahead with my idea to make an arcade game. However, I was somewhat indecisive about which one I would make, so I decided as part of the remediation process to instead combine two arcade games together to make a new game.
The two games that I have chosen to combine and are therefore the creative artefacts that will be the subject of my remediation project are going to be Pong and Breakout, both of which were made by Atari in 1972 and 1976 respectively.
As much as I really like my Curupira idea, I will perhaps save it until I have a bit more experience. The idea has been generated and it will not go to waste now.
In my next post, I will go into how I used brainstorming and mind mapping to further develop this idea and also to add more features to this concept that will make it more challenging and engaging for the user.
References
GameDev.net. n.d. Your First Step to Game Development Starts Here. [online] Available at: <https://www.gamedev.net/tutorials/_/technical/game-programming/your-first-step-to-game-development-starts-here-r2976/> [Accessed 4 February 2021].
Imindq.com. n.d. What is Brainstorming And How Is It Helpful?. [online] Available at: <https://www.imindq.com/uses/brainstorming> [Accessed 4 February 2021].
Lamm, H. and Trommsdorff, G., 1973. Group versus individual performance on tasks requiring ideational proficiency (brainstorming): A review. [online] Wiley Online Library. Available at: <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2420030402> [Accessed 4 February 2021].
Mindtools.com. n.d. Brainstorming: Generating Many Radical, Creative Ideas. [online] Available at: <https://www.mindtools.com/brainstm.html> [Accessed 4 February 2021].
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