Log #2: Aug/28/2024

Wednsday. The second development log. Things get wild.

Today felt like a very productive day, because of the place our team has reached thanks to our teachers' help. But first, me and two of my teammates attended a lecture for designers where we discussed creativity and the basic elements of a narrative.

We started off by taking pieces of papers with a written prompt and turning some lines that had been printed on them into an image that told an interesting story. I was happy with the drawing I created, which was of a fairy stealing an apple from a large creature, whom my peer thought was a snake. As instructed, I named the drawing, and I named it "Fruit Fly". As the teacher said, this exercise proved that we all could be creative.

The teacher then moved on to tell us about how neurons transfer electricity, and how that generates thoughts. They then gave us an example of such a transfer happening in real time: They showed us the japanese character "犬", and then told us what it meant. In learning this symbol's meaning (which was "dog"), new connections were made in our head -literally electricity jumping from one neuron's axom to another's dendrite over the synapse (also called the synapitc gap)!

We then did another exercise where the teacher would read from a passage of a book, and we would breifly write what would happen next. Through this, they showed us how to naturally build up a reader's imagination, and how breaking those expectations can then be interesting.

After this, the teacher asked us to work within our tables on what we thought the "elements of narrative" were. At the end, we came up with Subject, Plot, Tone, and Media (if I'm remembering correctly). Simply put, the subjects are the characters, the plot is what happens (maybe including things like a climax), the tone is how the author writes something to "feel" (or, additionally, how the reader feels), and the media, which is the tools used to tell the story.

With this information given to us, the teacher gave us all an assignment: to analyze the narrative elements in the short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

All this talk of writing had me excited, and I told myself I would read daily, as our teachers urged us to. While this change of pace of fun, what followed as I worked with the rest of my team again was very helpful.

Our teacher encouraged us to make a very simple "demo" where the game could be in a playable state. As the designer, much of our teacher's questioning was pointed at me, and I did not have very concrete ideas, and there was confusion among the team. Developing some basic ideas for a "demo" of sorts turned out to be super useful. As our team talked, we came up with ideas for the first few minutes of play for our game.

Initially I was opposed to this, because I thought it seemed premature to work out the intro. But what I did not realize was how much of the game is forced into life when you try to put something together in a demo. I did not realize how much more help it would be to have a playable game for everyone on the team. Our teacher directed us to follow the emotion we wanted to convey, and so we now have a basic idea for how the beginning of the game will work. And I found assurance in realizing that we could change the beginning if we want to, but it's hard to play at all if there isn't a beginning. Once we have a "demo" created, everyone will have a template to work from, and it will also be possible to test out different ideas. I'm very excited about this!

I concluded my day by working through another minute or so of that Unreal Engine tutorial.

-Luke Knotts