The second rapid ideation session has commence as of last night’s lecture (White, J. and Rubino, G., 2021). The theme of this session is Hackathon. I had heard the term hackathon before but I was not familiar with it.
A hackathon is an event where people come together to creatively solve problems creatively. It does not necessarily have to involve technology, but it usually does (Tauberer, J., 2014).
Much like a hackathon, the object of this rapid ideation session is to create an artefact that solves a problem in a fun and creative way. In last night’s seminar, we all spoke about a range of social issues that we could address through our creative artefacts, such as the economy, healthcare, mental health, education and the environment. We also spoke about a range of artefacts that cover both game development and UI/UX, which can be used to address social issues, such as simulations, applications with ‘gamification’ included and also ‘serious games’.
I am very keen on a range of social issues and I have explored different social issues within my personal artwork and therefore a project orientated around addressing and tackling social issues really appeals to me.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have already decided that I want to use this rapid ideation session to rejuvenate my 3D skills by modelling and rigging a character in Blender, for the purpose of being played in a game.
As I am very keen on environmental issues, I have decided that I would like to build a character for a fictitious game which is intended to educate people about issues surrounding the environment. To come up with a character to rig, I have decided to revisit a concept I came up with earlier in the unit, which is the Curupira.
I actually first came across the Curupira legend during Inktober of 2020 and I made a drawing of the character which has a little bit of animation.
The Curupira is a mythological creature from Brazilian folklore who strives to protect the rainforest and would wreak havoc on those that take too much from the rainforest (Myths and Folklore Wiki. n.d). The Curupira can be identified by their spiky reddish-orange hair and backwards feet, which they use to confuse hunters and poachers by making them think they are going when they are really coming. They can also create illusions or make a whistling sound that scares, confuses and drives hunters into madness.
I think that this character could be the basis for a game that educates players about the present day issue of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, in which multinational corporations are drilling for oil, which threatens wildlife and the indigenous communities who live there, as well as huge amounts of deforestation that is being carried out by the agribusiness industry.
The Curupira is clearly fantastical and a legend, but if this is combined with this very real issue, which is the destruction of one of Earth’s most vital ecosystems, it could result in an entertaining, yet thought-provoking game, which has a strong educational component and can inform players as to what is going on in the Amazon and what needs to be done to change it. The object of this game could be to play as the Curupira and to save the rainforest from destruction.
The creative artefact that I will produce for this project will be a character rig for the Curupira, complete with character animations which I will then transfer into Unity so that he can be interacted with.
I will first draw the Curupira to work out the design of the character and I will also draw the front and side view of the character as part of a character board, which I can then model against in Blender.
To model and rig the character, I will be relying heavily on tutorials as this is an area I am attempting to revisit and brush up on. While the tutorials that I find may be intended to model a specific character, I will of course deviate from this, where necessary to model my Curupira. There are also numerous tutorials which cover different styles of modelling, different levels of difficulty and different levels of detail so I will need to look around for a while before I find the tutorials that are most suited to my practice.
The animation stage is likely to be very challenging given that the Curupira’s knees bend in the same direction as us, but his feet point in the other direction and it will be interesting to work out how they walk.
Kanban board
Unlike the first rapid ideation session, I am not using the Scrum framework but I am instead using the Kanban framework. While I do not want to be too orthodox in my practice, instead of posting daily ‘Stand-up’ posts, I will instead add a section to the bottom of each post to indicate if the position of any of the tasks on my Kanban board have changed or if any new tasks have been added.
To kick off, I have already moved the ‘Brainstorming’ and ‘Ideation’ tasks to the Done list. The reason for this is that I have already decided on the idea that I want to go with. I was expecting there to be a more drawn out brainstorming period, like in the first rapid ideation session, but given that I have decided on my concept already, I will move these to done and I will begin sketching the character.
GitHub repository
As well as the Kanban board, I will be documenting any changes that I make to the repository I created on Github, as well as why I made them. I will also analyse how effective this is for version control during the course of this project. I have not made any more changes as yet.
References
Myths and Folklore Wiki. n.d. Curupira. [online] Available at: <https://mythus.fandom.com/wiki/Curupira> [Accessed 11 March 2021].
Tauberer, J., 2014. Hackathon Guide. [online] Hackathon.guide. Available at: <https://hackathon.guide/> [Accessed 11 March 2021].
White, J. and Rubino, G., 2021. Weekly Seminar – 10th March 2021.
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