Planning my dissertation: Skills Needed to be a Game Designer

A good game designer will require a large range of skills, and although some of them may come naturally to the designer, most skills can be learned. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design (2003) lists many of the skills that a game designer should possess if they want to be successful in the games industry.

Anatomy of a Game Designer:

Imagination:

A game exists in an artificial universe, a make-believe place governed by make-believe rules. Imagination is essential to creating this place. Fortunately, this is not a problem for most people. Even if you feel that your imagination isn't your strongest point, it's possible to develop and improve it. Of course, this isn't a new concept. It's been around for hundreds of years .

The imagination is like a muscle; with regular exercise, it grows stronger and easier to flex. Imagination comes in various forms:

• Visual and Auditory imagination enables you to think of new buildings, trees, animals, creatures, clothing, and people – how they sound and their strange ways of speaking.
• Dramatic imagination is required for the development of good characters, plots, scenes, motivation, emotions, climaxes and outcomes.
• Conceptual imagination is about relationships between ideas, their interactions and dependencies.
• Lateral thinking is the process of looking for alternative answers, taking an unexpected route to solve a problem.

Nor does imagination consist only of the ability to think of things that are completely new. It's also valuable to be able to look at an old idea and apply a new spin to it, to breathe new life into it with a fresh approach. Too many people in the game industry see something old and familiar and dismiss it. Instead they should think, “How can this be made better? How might this be more interesting

Technical Awareness:

Technical awareness is a general understanding of how computer programs, particularly games, actually work. It isn't necessary to be a software engineer, but it is extremely valuable to have had a little experience programming, even if only in Blitz Basic (www.blitzbasic.com) or some other simple language. A computer game designer's delivery medium is the computer, so it behooves you to know how computers do what they do and also to have a general idea of what they're not good at doing. A designer with entirely unrealistic expectations of what a computer can do isn't going to get very far. For example, computers do not understand English well. If your game design requires that the machine be able to interpret complex sentences typed on the keyboard, your programmers are likely to throw things at you.

You must also have a basic knowledge of the technical capabilities of your target platform. At a minimum, you need to know whether you're designing a product for a home console, desktop computer, handheld platform, or more than one of these. Every feature that you specify must be possible on the machine that you're designing for. If in doubt, ask the programmers. Knowing the limitations imposed by the selected platform will result in an achievable design.

Analytical Competence:

No game design is perfect from the start. Game design is a process of iterative refinement, which progresses from a rough draft to the finished meisterwerk. Consequently, you must be able to recognise the good and the bad parts of a design for what they are. This requires a keen logical and analytical mind, and the ability to manipulate nebulous concepts with a high level of mental agility and critical analysis.

It is very difficult to effectively criticise your own work. You can be excessively hard on yourself and become convinced that all your work is worthless, or you can be blinded by familiarity and unable to analyse your own work in an unbiased fashion. Inexperienced designers often err in both directions, swinging wildly from one to another.

There is no easy solution to these problems. Good self-analysis skills come with practise. As a reality check, you can try peer reviews (which are always a good idea anyway). See what your colleagues and co-workers think of your design. Try to choose people who are likely to give you an unbiased opinion. Friends and family are usually not good choices. They will be either too easy on you – after all, they are close to you personally – or too hard on you because they don't want to be seen as biased and, consequently, overcompensate.

A specific example of when analytical skills are particularly useful is in detecting dominant (that is, unbeatable, or nearly unbeatable) strategies at the design phase and weeding them out before they get into the code, as in the infamous Red Alert “tank rush”. The tank effectiveness in Red Alert was so out of balance that an experienced player could dedicate all production to cranking out a few tanks and then immediately storm the opposition base before the enemy had a chance to get a production line set up.

Mathematical Competence:

Designers must have basic math skills (particularly statistical math skills) because balancing a game is largely a matter of math and can be a difficult task. In the case of a real-time strategy game or a war game, the apparently simple problem of ensuring that there are no dominant strategies or fighting units to unbalance the game is actually quite math-intensive.

Aesthetic Competence:

Although you need not be an artist, you should have a general aesthetic competence and some sense of style. Far too many games are visual clones of one another, depending on stereotypes and clichés rather than real imagination. It's up to you (along with your lead artist) to set the visual tone of the game and to create a consistent, harmonious look.

Suppose you're designing a clever and calculating female assassin with nerves of steel. Many designers would clothe her in skin-tight black leather and give her a big, shiny automatic pistol; in other words they'd opt for the stereotype, the easy way out. A slightly more imaginative designer might give her a miniskirt and a crossbow – still male-fantasy material, but marginally more interesting. A really good designer would realise that an assassin needs to blend into her surroundings, to look like anybody else, yet still be visually identifiable to the player. He would think about her personality and create a unique visual style for her that is distinctive yet unobtrusive. Lara Croft is a good example of this kind of thing. Despite her ludicrous proportions, she's dressed appropriately but quite identifiably for her role as an explorer: shorts, tank top, hiking boots. More important, her shirt is a particular colour that nobody else in the Tomb Raider games wears, which makes her stand out on the screen. If you're seeing that colour, you're seeing Lara.

General Knowledge:

Some of the best game designers tend to be ex-programmers or people with at least some formal scientific training – as long as they have broadened their sphere of knowledge outside of their narrow field of specialist expertise. A base level of general knowledge is valuable for a game designer, as is the ability to research what you might not know. It helps to be well-versed in mathematics, logic, history, literature, art, science, and current affairs. The more source material a game designer can assimilate, the better the final game design will be.

Make sure you watch a lot of movies and documentaries. Read books, too, both for direct research and background material. The encyclopedia is a good place to start for any given subject. However, a game that is too true-to-life (and hence, is likely to require specialist knowledge) will disappoint its players. For example, if you're designing a game based on piracy on the high seas, then exact historical detail isn't going to be what they expect – a game based on venereal disease, scurvy, maggot-infested food that has to be eaten in the dark so the crew can't see what they're eating, starvation, brutality, and the “consequences” of dark and lonely nights on a female-free boat won't make a particularly interesting (or even tasteful) game.

On the other hand, if you have a game design featuring colourful, eye-patch wearing, wooden-legged pirates, gold, running deck battles, the Black Spot, the Jolly Roger, and buried doubloons secreted away on remote desert islands, then you probably have the seed of an entertaining game.

Writing Skills:

The professional game designer must have good writing skills. This means being clear, concise, accurate, unambiguous, and, above all, readable. Apart from having to write several detailed documents for each design, you might be expected to produce the story narrative or dialogue – especially if the budget won't stretch to a scriptwriter.

Writing comes in several forms, and we briefly discuss some of these here:

• Technical writing is the process of documenting the design in preparation for development. All possible questions on the game have to be answered unambiguously and precisely. For example, if a farm with on peasant produces one unit of food per week, does a farm with five peasants produce five units, or do the additional peasants consume additional food? Is the peasants' own food factored in? What is the maximum number of peasants that can work on a given farm? If all the peasants are killed in a raid, what happens to the farm? If it is not immediately destroyed, can the empty buildings be reoccupied by new peasants? How do farms get built anyway? Where do peasants come from anyway? At what rate? Does the player have to manage the farming process, or do the peasants just get on with it? Can peasants fight? And so on and so on.
• Fiction writing (narrative) is useful for the manual, background material; character descriptions; introductory, transitional, and finale material; as well as other bodies of text, such as mission briefings.
• Dialogue writing (drama) is needed for audio voiceovers and cinematic material. Unfortunately, in most games the dialogue is even cornier than 1970s television shows, and the acting is as bad or worse. Try to avoid clichés, and use grammar and vocabulary that match each character's personality. If you have an ear for regional dialects, it can add real variety to your game, but again, avoid stereotypes such as “dumb rednecks” or “brassy New Yorkers.” The game Starcraft made excellent use of the subtle variety of southern American dialects, including proud aristocrats, gruff old generals, obnoxious bikers, and cheerful mechanics.

The greatest game design acumen in the world will be useless to you unless you can effectively communicate your ideas. As a designer, you will often need to evangelise your design at several different levels. In the professional setting, you will initially need to present your design to a publisher. Following that, you need to obtain buy-in from the team that will develop the game. This can be done in person or in writing, but the result is the same. You will need to be able to transmit your enthusiasm for the game as well as go into mind-boggling detail of its finer points to allow the development team to be able to create a game from your vision.

Drawing Skills:

Some skill at basic drawing and sketching is highly valuable, although not absolutely required for a designer if you have a concept artist to work with. The saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is never more true than when you are trying to impart a game idea. The vast majority of computer games rely heavily on visual content, and drawings are essential when pitching a product to a third party. Game-publishing executives will be interested in a hot concept, a hot market, or a hot license, but only pictures get them excited. The images are the hook on which the executives will hang everything else that they hear. Otherwise, you can talk about concepts forever and they won't remember a thing when you leave the room because they don't have a visual hook to hang it on. The images will remain in their memories long after they forget the details.

The Ability to Compromise:

Probably the most important skill for a professional game designer is the ability to compromise on details and integrate a variety of opinions while preserving a consistent, holistic version of the game. In an ideal world, we would be able to design whatever suited us and never have to worry about the demands of a publisher or the interests of the customers. Unfortunately, these external needs and interests do have to be considered, and, more often than not, the game designer is constrained by genre or license.

Different people on the development team and at the publishing company will have concerns about their own areas of expertise (programming, art, music, and so on), and their opinions will pull and push the design in different directions. As the designer, it's tempting to seek sole ownership of the vision, to argue that things must be exactly as you imagined them and to ignore other considerations. After all, there are plenty of other voices in your company advancing points of view about other areas. But you must resist the temptation to do that, for two reasons:

• First, you must allow your team some ownership of the vision as well, or its members won't have any motivation or enthusiasm for the project. No one builds computer games solely for the money; we're all here so that we can contribute creatively.
• Second, a designer who gets a reputation as a visionary but who can't deliver a buildable, marketable game doesn't stay employed for long. It's your job to deliver an integrated design.

In many cases, you'll be given a brief that limits you to designing a genre clone or a heavily restricted licensed property. Being able to work within these limits to the satisfaction of the customer, whether your customer is the publisher, license holder, or end user, is essential. Unless you are one of the famous game designers who can guarantee success with your name alone, you are unlikely to be given a completely free rein. You may have designed the best text adventure game since Colossal Cave, but if the style of game is out of favour with the public, you're probably not going to get your game made – let alone published.

Ideally the hypothetical “perfect game designer” would possess all of the above skills, but the following are the specific skills which I would like to focus on for the dissertation module:

Imagination
Drawing Skills
Aesthetic Competence
The Ability to Compromise
Analytical Competence
Writing Skills (especially fiction writing and dialogue writing)

Planning my dissertation: Roles in the Industry

If I am to have an art based dissertation, I need to make sure it will actually be able to help me get a job in the games industry. Heather Maxwell Chandler and Rafael Chandler (2011) cover the general roles in the games industry, in the Fundamentals of Game Development.

Roles on the Team:

Production:

Production Roles run the gamut from production coordinator to executive producer. People involved in game production are focused on managing and tracking the game's development and are the main intermediary between the development team and anyone external to the team, even studio management. Those in production roles should keep the team happy, motivated, and productive on the project. Production people are not normally responsible for actually creating game assets, as their main responsibility is to effectively manage the people creating the content. This management keeps the team's time focused on actually completing game tasks instead of tracking schedules, dealing with personnel issues, managing external vendors, negotiating contracts, proof-reading marketing copy, and anything else external to creating game content.

Three basic roles exist, although the names may vary from company to company:

• Executive producer
• Producer
• Associate producer

Art:

Artists are responsible for creating all of the graphic assets for the game – characters, cinematics, vehicles, buildings, and levels. As technology improves, the quality of the assets must match the advancement, especially for next-generation hardware. These machines have more memory, processing power, and storage space, which gives the artists the opportunity to create highly detailed objects, realistic-looking terrain and water, and special effects for explosions and weather that are comparable to those found in the real world.

Artists work closely with the designers on the objects, worlds, and cinematics that are needed and also work with engineering to determine how to utilise the technology most effectively in the art production pipeline. If a large number of art assets needs to be created, artists are likely to outnumber other team members by two to one. Each team might have different titles for the art positions on a development team. The basic art positions are as follows:

• Art director – The art director's main function is communicating the artistic vision to the team. This person is skilled in all aspects of creating digital art and is responsible for ensuring that all of the artistic assets relate to each other within the game. An art director is a very skilled and respected artist who has 5 to 10 years of work experience. Not all projects will have an art director on the team.
• Lead artist – The lead artist works closely with the art director to ensure that the artistic vision is maintained throughout the development process. The lead manages the quality of the art assets and the day-to-day tasks of the team and is a go-between for the art director and the art team. This facilitation allows the art director to focus on the creative aspects of the game instead of managing personnel. If the team has no art director, the lead artist assumes the responsibility for defining the artistic vision. The lead artist is an experienced and respected artist with at least 3 to 5 years of game development experience.
• Concept artist – Concept artists are visionaries. They are responsible for creating concepts of all of the art assets before they are produced. They are skilled in 2D art, traditional drawing and painting methods, and sometimes 3D art. They work directly with the art director in creating and documenting the artistic vision of the game.
• World builder or level designer – The world builders or level designers are responsible for building the geometry and creating the textures for the game world. They are skilled in 2D and 3D art, and have an understanding of level design. In some companies, this position is considered to be a design position, as the gameplay is heavily impacted by the way the game world is mapped out.
• Asset artist – The asset artist has 2D and 3D art skills and is responsible for creating the assets that appear in the game world. These include such things as characters, weapons, vehicles, props, user interface screens, and any other necessary game assets. Some asset artists will specialise in a particular type of asset, such as vehicles.
• Animator – Animators are responsible for creating all the in-game and cinematic animations. They need to be skilled in traditional 2D and 3D animation. However, 3D animation is more desirable for game development, especially to take advantage of the latest technology.
• Technical artist – Technical artists manage the technical side of asset creation, such as creating collision volumes, making sure that objects are exported correctly, and applying physical attributes to an object. They will work closely with engineering on the art tools and art pipeline and, therefore, need to have enough technical knowledge to communicate with engineers.
• Marketing artist – Marketing artists create all the marketing assets for the game. These activities include taking game screenshots, assembling gameplay videos, and creating high-resolution art, packaging, and anything else that marketing needs to promote the game. These artists are usually skilled in 2D art, with some knowledge of 3D art.

Engineering:

Engineers are involved in every aspect of the game – graphics, animation, scripting tools, physics, user interface, sound, and more – and are responsible for creating all the code that makes the game work. They must start with design documents, define the necessary functionality, write code that creates the functionality, and then revise the functionality based on feedback. They also work closely with the art team to determine the technical art needs for the game.

Game engineering is much different from engineering business software, especially with regard to the high priority placed on creating an entertaining software package. Game engineers usually have a passion for games and understand the unique skills required for this position. Game engineers must be able to work well with creative types, managers, and other engineers on a project so the team can realise the vision of the game. The basic engineering roles on each game project are as follows:

• Technical director – The technical director is a counterpart to the art director. The technical director must be knowledgeable of the latest technology and determine how it can best be used in the game code. Technical directors focus some of their time on research and development and are ultimately responsible for setting the coding standards, determining which technologies are used in the game, coding and maintaining libraries, and so on. Not all projects have a technical director. A technical director must be a skilled engineer with at least 5 to 10 years of experience.
• Lead engineer – The lead engineer is responsible for managing the day-to-day tasks of the team. The lead also works closely with the technical director to determine what technologies are needed for the game. The lead may or may not have a chance to actually create code for the game, as it depends on how busy he or she is managing the engineers. If there is no technical director on the team, the lead engineer is responsible for setting the technical standards of the game. A lead has 3 to 5 years of experience, general knowledge of all areas of game technology, and good communication skills.
• Engineer - “Engineer” is a general title for a role that can have many variations within a development team. Many game engineers are well versed in several areas of programming but will probably choose to focus on one or two specialties. However, engineers need to be flexible enough to move out of their specialised areas to work in other areas if needed.

Some basic engineering roles on a development team are as follows:

• Networking engineer: The networking engineer is responsible for creating multiplayer code. This person works closely with the multiplayer designer to ensure that all the necessary gameplay functionality is supported.
• Sound engineer: The sound engineer focuses on creating the sound engine for the game. This person works closely with the sound designer to make sure that the sound engine can support the desired sound features for the game.
• Graphics engineer: The graphics engineer is responsible for creating the graphics code. This person works closely with the technical artist on the art tools and art production pipeline.
• Tools engineer: The tools engineer is responsible for creating the proprietary tools used during game development. These tools include scripting, lighting, exporters, localisation tools, and any other tools that can be coded to streamline the game production pipeline. This person will work with many different people on the team to get an understanding of what tools are needed.
• AI engineer: The AI engineer focuses on the artificial intelligence (AI) behaviours in the game. This person works closely with the design team to identify the behaviours and functionality that are needed for the characters in the game.
  
  

Design:

The game design team is responsible for developing, documenting, and scripting the core concept for a game. This concept can originate with the design team, creative director, studio management, publisher, or a combination of these and other team members. The design process varies from company to company, as each has its own procedures and role definitions.

Designers have a broad range of responsibilities on a development team, such as designing the game's control scheme, creating the characters' backgrounds and personalities, and designing the combat system. Ultimately, they are responsible for creating a compelling and immersive gameplay experience. To accomplish this goal, designers must work closely with artists and engineers to determine how to utilise art and technology to best bring the game to life.

Designers are involved in the game production process from start to finish. In pre-production, they are brainstorming and prototyping potential gameplay ideas and then documenting the ones that will work best within the game's limitations. During production, they are implementing the game design, which includes scripting missions, writing dialogue, and play-testing. Their duties also include incorporating feedback and redesigning certain aspects of the game when necessary. In addition, designers must work cooperatively with the other team members throughout the development process. The basic design positions on a development team are as follows:

• Creative director – Each development team will interpret the role and responsibility of a creative director differently. Normally the creative director is responsible for communicating the overall creative vision to the team and ensuring that this vision is carried through to every aspect of the game.

To be successful at this position, the creative director must interact with many different team members. The creative director ensures that the environments, characters, music, dialogue, and gameplay all work together to form a cohesive whole. It is important to note that the creative director does not assume the role of the art director, but rather works closely with the art director in determining the look and feel of the game. Not all projects have creative directors. Someone in this position usually has 5 to 10 years of work experience and lead design experience on several shipped titles.

• Lead designer – The lead designer is responsible for managing the day-to-day tasks of the design team and acting as a go-between for the creative director and designers. The lead designer directs the design team in documenting the design concepts, prototyping gameplay, implementing design features, balancing gameplay, and redesigning features as needed. If the team has no creative director, the lead designer is responsible for communicating the creative vision. A lead designer usually has at least 3 to 5 years of design experience.
• Designer - “Designer” is a general title for a role that has different functions on a team. The designer is responsible for creating, prototyping, implementing, and balancing different areas of the game, depending on his or her expertise. A few types of designers on a team are as follows:
  • Systems designer: This person designs the system components within the gameplay. Examples include the scoring system, the combat model, the controller scheme, and the character creation system.
  • UI designer: This person designs the game's user interface including how the UI screens will function and fit together in the game.
  • Level designer: Also known as a world builder, this person creates the level layouts for the game. Some developers consider this to be an art position rather than a design position. In some instances, the designer creates the level designs on paper and then an artist builds the levels.
  • Scripter: This person places the interactive objects and enemies in the levels. Essentially, he or she controls how many enemies a player will face, where the gameplay challenges appear in a level, how non-player characters will interact with the player's character, and so on.
• Writer – The writer is responsible for creating the story elements, characters and dialogue for the game. The write interacts closely with the lead designer and/or creative director to ensure that these elements are in keeping with the game's creative vision. The writer also writes marketing and PR copy, website content, the manual, and anything else that needs to be written related to the game. Writers must have experience in creative writing and writing for interactive media.
  
  

Quality Assurance Testing:

Quality Assurance (QA) testers are a vital part of the game development process and are involved in play-testing and finding defects in the game. Testers usually begin their work in the production phase, after playable game builds are available. They are involved in the development process until the end and are often the last people to finish working on the game. Testers work closely with all members of the development team and are a good resource for testing prototypes and new features. The basic testing roles include the following:

• Lead QA tester – The Lead QA tester works closely with the producer and other leads on a project to evaluate the game's features from a testing point of view. For example, if the game is going to feature 50 variables for creating a character, the lead QA tester will estimate how long these variables will take to test and then most likely suggest that the number be greatly reduced to save on testing time. This recommendation might be because testing combinations of different variables can quickly eat up valuable time, which is needed for testing other areas of the game. The lead QA tester also determines, along with the producer and leads, when the game is ready to be code released.
  
  
  The lead QA tester is responsible for writing the game's test plan. To do this, he or she must know exactly how every part of the game functions so these details can be included in the test plan. Finally, the lead QA tester manages all the testers and assigns them specific areas of the test plan to check. A lead QA tester should have 2 to 3 years of experience as a QA tester.

• QA tester – QA testers are responsible for checking the game's functionality against the test plan, testing new features and prototypes, and finding defects in the game software. In addition, they check that the game meets all of the console manufacturer's technical requirements. They spend the majority of their workday actually playing the game and, therefore have informed opinions on the overall fun factor.
  
  

Corporate:

Any full list of game credits includes recognition of all the corporate people who are integral to creating and launching a successful game. People in these roles are usually working for the publisher, and are responsible for creating the packaging, marketing campaign, sales plan, and anything else that supplements the actual game. These people normally communicate with the producer and are treated as external members of the development team. These departments include the following:

• Marketing and public relations – The main responsibility of the marketing department is to market the game to the target consumer. Their challenge is building a compelling marketing campaign around the game's features, story, and gameplay experience that entices players to buy the game. To be most effective, marketing should be involved with the game during pre-production. This involvement gives them the opportunity to suggest features and other ways to make the game more marketable. For example, they might suggest using licensed music from a popular band, casting celebrity voices, or adding some unique new gameplay features.
  
  
  Public relations is responsible for generating publicity for the game through websites, magazines, and television spots. This process includes setting up interviews with the development team and organising press tours for the game. In addition, they create unique publicity events to get players to ask questions about the game. Marketing and public relations work together closely to ensure that they are presenting a unified vision of the game to the target audience.

• Creative services – Creative services works closely with the marketing department to create the packaging and manual for the game. After the look and feel of the packaging is decided, creative services generates the necessary assets, creates the final layout, and coordinates the printing of all the materials.
  
  
  Because the producer is more familiar with the game than someone in the creative services department, the producer is expected to provide the manual text, screenshots, and other game assets for the printed materials.

• Sales – The sales department is responsible for selling the game to retail stores, such as Walmart, EB Games, and Best Buy, as well as online providers, such as IGN's Direct2Drive. They also determine whether special editions of the game can be created to increase sales. For example, a special edition of the game may be created that includes game-related merchandise, a strategy guide, and other premiums.

The specific roles I would like to focus on are as follows:

• Art Director // Lead Artist – once I have enough experience, I would like to work up to a lead role in this area.
• Creative Director // Lead Designer – this is again something I would like to consider once I have the required experience.
• Concept Artist
• Designer (Systems Designer, UI Designer, Level Designer)
• Writer

Bibliography

This is where I will make note of any sources of information that I use throughout the course of the dissertation module.


Books:

• Andrew Rollings & Ernest Adams (2003). Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. USA: New Riders Publishing.
• Derek Lea (2009). Creative Photoshop CS4. Oxford: Elsevier.
• Don Seegmiller (2003). Digital Character Design and Painting. USA: Charles River Media.
• Ettore Maiotti (1993). The Drawing Handbook. Italy: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri.
• Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten (2007). The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design. New York: Lone Eagle Publishing Company.
• Haitao Su & Vincent Zhao (2011). Alive Character Design. United Kingdom: Cypi Press.
• Hazel Harrison (1999). Drawing with Pencils & Pastels. London: Lorenz Books.
• Heather Maxwell Chandler & Rafael Chandler (2011). Fundamentals of Game Development. London: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
• John Torreano (2007). Drawing by Seeing. London: Lawrence King Publishing.
• Lee Sheldon (2004). Character Development and Storytelling for Games. Boston: Thomson Course Technology.
• Les Pardew (2005). Beginning Illustration and Storyboarding for Games. Boston: Thomson Course Technology.
• Phil Metzger (2007). The Art of Perspective. Ohio: North Light Books.
• Steve Ince (2006). Writing for Video Games. London: A & C Black Publishers Limited.
• Tom Bancroft (2012). Character Mentor. Oxford: Elsevier.
• John Truby (2007). The Anatomy of Story. USA: Faber and Faber, Inc.

Journal Articles:

• David Freeman. (2004). Creating Emotion in Games: the Craft and Art of Emotioneering. Computers in Entertainment (CIE) - Theoretical and Practical Computer Applications in Entertainment. Volume 2, Issue 3, 15-15.
• Grant Tavinor. (2005). Video Games, Fiction, and Emotion. IE '05 Proceedings of the second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment. 201-207.
• Regina Bernhaupt. (2007). Using Emotion in Games: Emotional Flowers.ACE '07 Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology. 41 - 48.

Websites:

• Bon Exposé. Concept Art. Available: http://bonexpose.com/featured/concept-art/. Last accessed 17th October 2013.
• Brandon Sheffield. (2009). Interview: Jenova Chen and ThatGameCompany's Vision of the Future. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/23612/Interview_Jenova_Chen_and_Thatgamecompanys_Vision_of_the_Future.php. Last accessed 8th October 2013.
• Brian Lemay. (2011). Storyboarding Basics. Available: http://www.brianlemay.com/Pages/animationschool/storyboarding/storyboarding%20basics.html. Last accessed 22nd June 2014.
• Creative Skillset. Concept Artist. Available: http://www.creativeskillset.org/film/jobs/productiondesign/article_4680_1.asp. Last accessed 17th October 2013.
• David Colson. (2013). Video game style guides are extremely useful.Available: http://peripherallabs.com/video-game-style-guides/#.Ulwsm1Csh8E. Last accessed 14th October 2013.
• Disney. Job Vacancies - Concept Artist. Available: http://www.disney.co.uk/disneyinteractivestudios/blackrockstudio/careers/conceptartist.jsp. Last accessed 17th October 2013.
• Jennifer Albright. (2012). How to Make a Storyboard - Storyboard Lingo and Techniques. Available: http://www.videomaker.com/article/15415-how-to-make-a-storyboard-storyboard-lingo-techniques. Last accessed 22nd June 2014.
• Jesse Schell. (2013). Nobody Wants to Read Your Design. Available: http://www.slideshare.net/jesseschell/nobody-wants-to-read-your-design. Last accessed 19th October 2013
• Josh Clark. Why do music and art move us?. Available: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/music-and-art-move-us.htm. Last accessed 8th October 2013.
• Liberated Pixel Cup Styleguide. Available: http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/styleguide.html. Last accessed 14th October 2013.
• Margrave: The Blacksmith’s Daughter Early Storyboard. Available: http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/margrave-the-blacksmiths-daughter-early-storyboard/. Last accessed 14th October 2013
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Planning my dissertation: Initial thoughts

As the third year draws ever closer, the next big academic task looms overhead - the dissertation module!

The first step is to decide what type of dissertation I want to undertake. I need to pick something that will not only be a learning experience, but something that will keep me motivated for a whole year of work.


3D Modelling:

Straight off the bat I'm going to rule out 3D modelling. It is an area in which i have much to learn, but is also one which I currently find more frustrating than fulfilling. I will improve on 3D modelling casually, in my own time, rather than in something as high-pressure as a dissertation module.


Programming:

Next, I'm going to rule out programming. While I do have an interest in improving my programming skills, I think it would be too stressful to try and get from my level of programming knowledge - which is minimal - to a level in which I could produce an artefact of a high standard.


Drawing & Creative Writing:

With the above in mind, I have decided that I want to base my dissertation around either art, or creative writing. These are both areas that I feel I would actually enjoy studying in depth. I will most likely settle on a dissertation that focuses mainly on artwork, as drawing is something that I have always had a passion for. The amount of time I have spent drawing has lessened over the years, and it is something that I would love to get back into, while being something in which I still have plenty of room for improvement. I think the dissertation module will be the perfect opportunity to brush up on my art skills, and develop them further.