Establishing solid gameplay knowledge.

Final/Only Project Update:

Allow me to explain how my project went incredibly well after working very little on it and completely detonating almost immediately. I started out my project excited and happy but pretty chill overall. I knew I would be busy but I wanted to tackle this topic which had been bothering me for a while.

Take my knowledge, clean and refine it to solid objects and fill in any gaps I find. Good idea, right? Also, let’s not reinvent the wheel and instead find the tools and knowledge to help expedite the process. So, week one grab a new Game Dev framework concept and I whistle my way to my mental attic, ready to refine some gaming knowledge to some sort of solid conceptual object and … Boom

I opened the door to my mental attic where I keep my game dev mental knowledge and it was stuff from floor to ceiling with junk. It was nothing but a mess with no room to work. What the hell was the point of making things solid and polished if I couldn’t find them again? And forget about adding that new tool I brought into the mix. It would just get lost with all the rest.

Week one eat at me after realizing that I was trying to make the mess cleaner and refined but not organized and useful. While I do want to be able to convey what I know and eventually refine the ideas of game systems to core concepts and dynamics, I realized I needed to make what I already knew useful and it wasn’t. Refining a concept is all fine and dandy but unless I understand how to use it and where to find it when I need it, it’s nothing more than a fancy ornament.

That was easier said than done though as I realized that all the random junk needed to be together. Game development isn’t mathematics or a science where you can make useful sense in isolation from other areas. I needed to have a way to sense of all of these pieces that don’t fit together, that do completely different tasks, and which are otherwise completely random somehow make sense beyond being simply being connected to “Game Development”. It had to be useful.

The word “useful” in particular was the turning point for me though. I realize that everything in that stuffed mental attic was only random because it lack a “useful” organization. So that’s when my project became about organizing my knowledge into categories which would relate to how I would use them.

That has me on a track now which I feel will put me in long term good shape. I’ve started creating system of categories broad enough to serve me both in game development and in analyzing and talking about game systems. For example, one such category is “lenses”. These are conceptual structures or frameworks which you can pick up and examine a game through. MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) being one by which you can break down games.

Furthermore, by placing these at the top of a blog or stating before a conversation, you can convey the particular lens and other such information relevant at a glance to frame a given discussion. I personally think that in particular will be very useful for both sides as you can have very different discussions simply by changing something like the type of lens you are viewing a game topic through.

So that took me halfway through the month and I did get busy. The rest was actually me struggling with something rather boring but essential. Naming my blog and entity I want to work under long term. For various reasons I wanted something separate from my name here so I have achieved that and created my blog page, though due to being busy with life stuff I ran out of time to make much more than that.

Overall, very happy and Surprised by how this one played out and I’m eager to keep going from here now.