Brief 3

This project took about two weeks to complete, and I feel our time was managed okay. In this project, I worked on helping the group come up with a solid idea for a game design concept, and then helped expand on the idea in the Google Slides and write up the transcript for the voice-over of the slides. After we all recorded our lines, I then collected them all as well as taking screenshots of the slide and put them all together in post-editing, which took me about two days to do but was worth it.

Working with this group was a lot better for me as this group was mostly responsive when possible. Although we were a bit slow on the task during the first week, we picked up the pace in the second week and got it done within a pretty good time. The reason why the first week was slow was because I was focusing on my GAD171 project (that of which you can view here), alongside my weekly reflections and such. The whole assignment wasn't too hard to get done; the part that took the longest was the post-editing because most of the time was spent working on adding subtitles to the video to break up the still-frames and make the voice-overs easier to understand (this was pretty useful in the case of Ronan with his horrid microphone).

I have a really positive opinion on the main premise of our game design concept. I haven't seen any other games with this concept, so I would like to expand on this concept further with my group in Brief 4 by making a design document for it. Overall, I think this project went well, and definitely a lot smoother than the previous projects of not only this module, but my other modules as well. I'm quite happy with what we have presented so far, and I am keen to continue on with this game design concept with my group in Brief 4.

There's a couple of things that I would like to mention in regards to what I learned from what happened in this project.

From my experience with working with this group for this project, I can tell things are going to be a lot smoother sailing compared to my previous group, and I am looking forward to working on Brief 4 with this group. If we continue with the steady communication and okay teamwork like we did in this project, we should be able to get this final project done without much trouble. I noticed that sometimes my group was a tiny bit off when it came to working together, especially with recording the lines when Cody and Josh recorded like 80% of the slides and left only four slides for me and Ronan, but I believe I could combat this by giving more direction, which I noticed was lacking during this project, and I believe that by doing so, it will not only allow us to get work done more efficiently, but it will also hopefully deal with the problem of miscommunication.

Another thing—considering that the pitch video took about two days to make, that tells me that I spent a bit too much time working on what ultimately is just a pre-recorded presentation of our slides. There were some things I could have done which could have saved a lot of time such as copying and pasting the slide transitions instead of recreating them for every instance, etc. I do believe, however, that the time spent on implementing subtitles into the video was worth it, as that helped break up still-frames in the video and made it look nicer, in my opinion. I took inspiration of the specific styling from games like Resident Evil 7 (most predominantly), Silent Hills P.T. and Metal Gear Solid V that have really clean-looking subtitles and text on-screen when they appear.

There were some points that I made in the "So What" reflection that I'll go into further detail about, therefore explaining what I'll do next time.

Firstly, the point about direction in teamwork—I do believe that there wasn't enough direction given in the group, which is vital if you want to get a project done. I did give directions to the group at times, such as where exactly to store voice files in the Google Drive directory and (partially) which slides we should write out, and that did get those things done, so I think that in the next project, it would be a good call to take on the role of leadership when we run into a problem of poor teamwork, don't know what to do, or are having an issue with miscommunication. I believe we'll be able to get things done more efficiently because of this as we will spend less time figuring out what the hell we're supposed to do and minimizing the problem of miscommunication or group members going off and doing parts on their own without advising the group.

Lastly, the point about the video editing taking too long—I realized near the end of the editing stage of the video just how time-wasting my method of animating each and every slide transition was. I know that, next time I make a video in this style for a project, I can simply copy and paste the keyframes for each transition instead of animating every one by hand, which will save a fair amount of time. I believe that this will save some stress on myself and will also get the video done and ready quicker, which will allow my group members more time to complete their learning journal pages for the project, therefore saving us all the stress. The part that took the most amount of time during the editing process was the subtitles, but I don't think there is a better way to do this that will save time considering I was basically just copying, pasting, changing the text, and doing it over again, and I think the quote "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" (Bert Lance, 1977) goes well with this.