Idea Generation

There exist 5 main Idea generation methods that are used when coming up with a creative idea. these are Serendipitous generation where an idea just comes up as the result of an accident, for example Grand Theft Auto exists because of a bug in Race and Chase where the police try to ram the player off the road instead of pulling them over. there’s also Derivative generation where you steal someone else’s idea and change up a couple of elements. (I’ll admit, characters such Super Sheep were “inspired” by toys I own as well as other characters such as Superman and Sonic) Artistic innovation is where you use art work to try and inspire you to think creatively. Symbiotic ideas are where you and a group of people come up with and bounce ideas off of each other. Targeted innovation is where you do a ton of research to lead you on your creative adventure. this has taught me wonders about potential ways I could use my imagination to create wacky games. For example In a group session where we had to come up with a digital game based around specific animals we bounced ideas off of each other and worked on different ideas from a puzzle platformer to a quiz game to a fighting game.

The wonders of a child’s imagination

The Imagination of children is a wild and often wonderful thing that allows kids to come up with Ideas and games unbound by the laws of reality. (due to a child’s lack of grasp on what’s possible) This in turn makes childhood imagination the perfect source of inspiration for both digital and non-digital games alike (for example, the core of most platform games is that a character is jumping to and from platforms often over bottomless pits, much like how children pretend the floor is lava)

Lights!

Lights! is a board game I’ve made up for the non digital game. I came up with it as a result of staring at a light in class and just saying to myself “OK yeah, that’s a board game now.” I then got to work designing a card back and a PowerPoint, both of which I admittedly forgot to send myself so on Monday I had to make a PowerPoint presentation compiling all of the digital design work done for Lights and a new card back. On Saturday me and my family gathered the resources needed to make the game (cards, a cake board, some wood, a small torch, gray primer, cone pieces from the game Stack Em) and while my dad made the light device I got to work creating the designs for the cards (including a new back that also gets reused for the box graphic) designing 5 new characters (Snailin Mcscree, Voltrix, Bulbris, Enery and Shroom Loom), because the other 5 characters were things I made up before. (Those being Super Sheep, The Night Pig, Lorange, Guyzo The Mechanic and Surfer Dude Jeff) after I compiled everything together I printed it all out and then me and Mum cut and stuck everything together using scissors and glue. after everything came together me and my family played the game twice to see if it works.

Digital Art skills

digital art skills (such as the ones we learned using paint to draw cups) are often used in graphic design to create posters for movies, covers for video game boxes and even adverts for products such as Flash (the cleaning product), Fairy Liquid and even some board games. (like the one I made for my non-digital board game) we used our digital art skills in Microsoft Paint to create a cup and then design something using said cup. I ended up making up a new character called Cuppin T Stail (a purple character in a yellow shirt whose head is shaped like the cup I made him from)

Photographic Shopping

we’ve officially used Photoshop for the first time, as a guy who’s used to Pixlr’s set of tools to create Super Sheep and friends, I’ve got to say that these tools were quite disorienting to use (not to mention needlessly complicated *cough cough* finding the fill tool *cough cough*) but as I got the hang of manipulating Sonic and some random hamster in a desert while drawing a confused Super Sheep being like “hey guys what’s going on here? is this Photoshop?” but hey, this is industry standard stuff I’m learning here so I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised, and even then I did eventually get a decent drawing of Super Sheep out of it

Some Storyboards, More Photoshop And Some Game Construction Too

With Mr Burns (not that one) we learned about doing storyboards and how their used for conveying scenes in films such as How To Train Your Dragon (even though the example was actually from Dragons Riders of Berk, which is the TV spin off), we did a non digital storyboard recreation breaking down our favorite scene from a movie or TV show. (I chose to do the classic scene in Toy Story where Woody first discovers Buzz Lightyear) After that we used Photoshop to do the same thing but for a pre-chosen scene done using pictures of Plasticine figures being pasted on the same storyboard template we used in the non-digital version. (I chose to throw in some extra doodles of Super Sheep slightly after the scene) This taught us that storyboards don’t have to be done using drawings, they can be done using LEGO Minifigures (his example not mine) and Live action screenshots. After that we went on to construct 2 where we created a super basic PAC-MAN clone by making sprites in the software itself and then importing them directly into the game area and then adding behaviors into the game (if PAC-MAN touches the ghost he dies)