Brief 4

This was the final brief for the class for the trimester, and fortunately not a brief that required as many things to keep track of as the previous briefs. 

I continued to work with my group from brief 3, which included Cody, Ronan and Josh. This group was still pretty responsive when attempts to keep in touch were made. That being said, aforementioned attempts to keep in touch weren't made until later into the brief's time because at that point, I shifted focus to my weekly learning journal pages and briefs for GAD171. It wasn't until the last week of the brief that we got into close contact and I got up to speed with what was going on and what needed doing. This was further prompted by Cody when we met during a playtesting session for a GAD171 project. Once I did get back into contact with the group, however, things really picked up again.

The section I needed to do, which was all of section 4, "Characters and Classes" (with additional help from Cody with the last sentence in "4.1. Classes", thanks Cody), was definitely manageable for me but did take a fair amount of time to complete. There was also a few times where I had to message members of the group to help me brainstorm some ideas for each class—i.e. the mechanic's specialist perk was Ronan's idea and I used my idea of what that perk should do, which was to complete a single task for the player, alongside Ronan's idea—but I did use a lot of my own ideas as well. I did use some inspiration for some ideas, i.e. the premise of the Scientist class' gel compounds being taken from the selection of Aperature Science gels from the 2011 Valve game Portal 2. By the completion of the project, it was almost an hour and a half past the due date and I was running on reserve energy (basically meaning I was VERY tired). Other than the section, I also helped with editing the document by changing the table of contents from the way it was before to a proper table of contents using the feature built into Google Docs. It was originally a simple list without page numbers or proper indenting. 

Overall, I think this project wasn't too hard to do, but I would've liked to get it done earlier and get more of the document done. I'm really grateful for the support I got from Cody and Ronan when I was stuck on my section, as they helped me get through it.

There's some things that came to my attention from what happened that I think should be discussed.

For starters, losing track of this brief on my behalf—as said before, this was because I had a lot on my plate for GAD171 as well. While this brief was underway, I was spending the time focusing on completing the game design document for my group's board game for GAD171, as well as playtesting our board game with other members to get data and make changes. It was only during the last week of the brief when I made enough progress on my GAD171 project where I was comfortable enough to switch focus back to GIM110. I feel that I need to find ways to get more organized with my work, and I have recently found one way to keep track of everything needing to be done. I was suggested by a facilitator during a support meeting to use Trello, which is an online organization tool that allows you to sort your tasks into lists so you can keep track on what needs to be done. I think this would definitely help keep things organized for me.

About how I went with the document—I would have liked to contribute more to the document, and I feel that I did the least in the project, which I'm not happy about at all. I feel that if I had of been in better contact with my group, I would have probably been able to contribute more to the document.

There is one main thing that I will improve on next time, which is the organization side of things.

Now that I have a method of keeping track of the tasks I need to do, that being Trello, I'm going to use that next time to help keep myself organized and hopefully improve my workflow. I'll at least have an idea of everything I need to do at any time (well, that is, when I'm connected to the internet or even with a device). I will also seek other methods or organization if I use this method and find that it just doesn't work as well as I was hoping.