Meeting with Lynn Parker

I had set up a meeting with the Computer Arts programme tutor, Lynn, for today at 11am in Whitespace. All previous blog posts from this point was the progress I had at the time, and I wanted to run my ideas by her before beginning to refine things.

So, I showed her all my work so far, and she said I was in a good place, that it's good I came prepared, and that I was quite far along for just the first week of class. She said I had many ideas covering a wide range of topics, and that now I really needed to narrow things down and concentrate on a theme. I was aware that my ideas were a bit all over the place, but that was intended so I could get my thoughts down and think about their potential. Lynn did say though, not to focus too much on the research question we'll eventually revolve our projects around, as many people had fixated on it previously. But for now I feel comfortable focusing on a theme and idea, not the worded question. As I had a lot of written work done, Lynn said I should really get stuck into just creating things rather than just thinking about them.

From my many project theories from the previous post, I like three quite strongly that I pointed out. First, I'm interested in creating the culture of a world through the designs of the characters and environments and looking into visual consistency in games. Second, was the idea revolving around customisation. I myself really enjoy it, but I think I like experiencing and researching it, but don't think I could make a creative project around it due to probably needing coding if I were to make an interactive artefact  Lynn also mentioned that while customisation is recent, it isn't highly current. My third preference involves main character and NPC designs and comparing them.

At this point, Lynn pointed out she was interested in the NPC companion idea, and that's got me thinking about it too. She said it was current and popular, so there'd be recent research on it, and the project would show more employability than the others. I really started to like the idea of it, and think it has loads of potential. Such a theme would allow me to incorporate elements from the other ideas to inform my work, so it's a good starting point. It allows me to investigate not only character design, but also gameplay, which would be more interesting. This route would also be suitable for pushing my skills in to 3D character modeling, which I haven't done before and is a good skill to show off in the exposition. I found this meeting really helpful just to get another person's perspective on things, and talking it out to start focusing. For now, I'll start looking into games that have companions as main characters, and begin doing some design exercises.