So as stated in the first post I had a strong idea of the broad topic surrounding my research question, but I struggled in figuring out what the practical side of the honours project would be: I had 3-4 game ideas but I didn’t know which one to go with!

 

Development of Overall Question

So after talking to Dayna and other classmates during the tutorial session I was advised to look at the question more from my original perspective (that is, more about how games build their actual story world and setting vs how they exposit the lore via mechanics and systems).

I had originally thought that this was a bit too large in scope but maybe if done correctly the topic of exposition mechanics could become a strong support and foundation towards the analysis of how games tell and establish their worlds differently from other media. So now in addition to identifying mechanics used in games to explore a wider world, i’ll also look into what kind of storytelling techniques and settings work specifically because they are made for games.

Dayna also suggested I look into Jörg Ihle, a writer/director both in traditional film and video games, who who had inspired several Abertay students to do a Storyworld Jam a few years back as well as the topic of transmedia storytelling which Jörg specializes in, which to be honest, i’m not too familiar about.

 

Game Idea Feedback

I also showed Dayna my rough bullet-points on the several game ideas I had and the feedback was good, he said that all the game ideas (see Honours Blog #1) could work but agreed with me that the first idea, the Spymaster Game, would be the most complex as in addition to programming it also required art assets.

Dayna was very interested by my third idea, the Story Tiles game, as it was definately something never done before and was small enough to show that I could deliver a full product in a short amount of time. He suggested that I look into paper prototypes for all my ideas but try and create a digital prototype for the Story Tiles game instead which as of right now, is the plan.

Dayna also suggested that I look into other games not of the AAA (admittedly the examples of systems I sent him was from my favourite games) and suggested two games to me relating to Story Tiles’ mobile-oriented interactive fiction: Year Walk and Sailor’s Dream so that’ll be the next thing on my games list to look into.

 

Next Steps

Overall the meeting was very useful as it gave me confidence in the next steps of the project, the new direction towards the creative writing process of worldbuilding for games has me excited for the project and the idea of paper prototypes will allow me to showcase the design principles that the game ideas are trying to answer without spending too much time on the coding side and the Story Tiles game does seem like the simplest one to execute.

• Look into Year Walk and Sailor’s Dream
• Write up design docs and core game loops for Spymaster Game and Story Tiles Game ideas in order to do paper prototypes
• Look into Jörg Ihle, transmedia storytelling and the Storyworld Jam