Meeting 3

Making solid plans for this summer program

Brainstorming Jamboard #2

Some ideas:

• Design competitions (art, music composition)
• Balancing personal work with design team work—and maybe focus on these on different days
• Small group assignments (sprints) with a longer personal project
• Dedicate certain weeks to certain types of skillbuilding
• Stories with branching paths (this sounds good for teams—people in charge of different branches)
• Share da air—challenges that are designed to bring different skillsets together

A possibility: clubs within our program.

Student organizations for Interactive Arts & Media at Columbia College

Clubs could have their own facillitator, Discord, challenges, presentations. An opportunity for birds-of-a-feather to learn new skills together, and dive into resources and inspirations.

Another possibility: team design challenges as mixed-media clusters of prototypes and projects, all orbiting a common theme, as opposed to a single finished project.

Personal enrichment and skill development:

• Visual art and animation portfolios
• Environment concept art
• Game logic strategies (minimalist game prototypes)
• Game narratives and storylines
• Music and audio banks
• Industrial design (consoles, VR equipment, etc)—could be 3D digital prototypes
• AR phone game investigations

Breakout room discussions

Discuss a plan for the term, and create a proposal for everyone—what we should be doing week-by-week.

During your meeting:

1. Have someone in the team type out the program proposal, and upload it to Google Classrooms. It doesn't need to be writing-intensive.
2. Select a new person to be the representative in talking about it to the rest of us.

Personal study recommendations

The 4–8 hours per week that you should dedicate to independent work for this program can include research and learning. If you investigate new software and resources, will also give you good material for your scheduled MC day.

Learning Construct 2?
Go to the Videos page and do the Crash Course and Platformer tutorials this week.

Can't get access to Construct 2?
Find an alternate, download it, and try it out this week. Find a video tutorial to help.

Interested in Piskel animations?
Look into the Piskel video tutorials. I also have a video tutorial for using sprite animations in Construct 2.

Want to learn more about digital game graphic techniques?
Check out the tutorials at Envato Tuts+.

Interested in music composition?
You can start by reading Midnight Music: The Guide to Composing Music for Video Games. A Google search for "how to compose game music" will render lots of other results.