My turkey workshops inspired me so much that I had to do something to bring such cooperative game making atmosphere to my place, so I wouldn’t have to wait for next Turkey visit Just joking, but the thing is, last Saturday we opened game design workshops in Warsaw which will take place every two week. We did some brainstorming, we wrote some game concepts and started to work on our game prototypes. All of this in eight hours, so it was impossible to finish all of this! I’ve named our little meetings as: DBC, that is Design Boost Camp (in polish it’s a more crazy name ).

		FIRST DBC! WYŚWIETL POKAZ SLAJDÓW POBIERZ WSZYSTKIE

As you see from the photos we had a great fun doing all of the things. There were couple of landmarks that I won’t forgot in a long time and yep, I’m sure this, because some of them were just funny stuff, but some are problems that I have to resolve doing next workshops (coming soon! ). So here is a little summary:

-> There were 11 people on workshops (including me), a mix of:

—/> Game designers;

—/> Only one graphic artist, next time more will come

—/> Mathematicians;

—/> Coders;

—/> And even one general! ;D

-> Brainstorming was crazy, maybe too crazy? Even though I’m a believer of linking the ideas, even if the idea is just a single word without ‘game’ meaning, I think that next time I would do more directed brainstorm or I would try to analyze them and divide somehow, so it would be simpler to choose from them in the next stage when we will be doing game concept based on mix of generated ideas.

-> There were three teams, each had to create game concept. The problem was that two teams had one person with professional game design experience and one had nobody like this. I think this influenced the game concepts that came out. The team without pro-guy created game concept concentrated more on theme and didn’t think too much about game mechanics. I’m not saying they did bad, because they did a great job. I would like, in the future, to make all of those game concepts a playable reality! I’m not thinking to publish them, just to make some prototypes, maybe even something more…

-> I didn’t think about the mechanic for choosing which game concept we will try to prototype. With a little discussion we agreed to make one game concept, but it should be done otherwise… I’m thinking that the best would be to stay in the teams, so that every team would get to work on its own game prototype. The problem with this was that we had too less experienced people and when we started to do this it was quite late (just 1,5 hour left). As I think now we should this hour in some other way.

-> Thankfully the conference room was OK. It didn’t give us to much space, but I can’t complain. But more than 12 people and the room would be too small.

-> TeeGee and his team did some pure awesome thing to make a graphic for their game. They made characters, obstacles from play-doh and then from a shit of paper they made some kind of green screen. And then TeeGee placed his mac upside down to make a photo of the thing standing in front of miniature green screen. They were laughing that they made they’re rendering graphic for their game. Cool idea! I like it very much

-> I didn’t manage to make physical game prototype of TeeGee’s team. I think they were couple of reasons behind this *failure*:

—/> Lack of time! We had to less time to make anything awesome…

—/> Because TeeGee already started to work on digital game prototype I tried too much to resolve the reality of digital game on paper. It should be the other way around.

—/> Maybe I should’ve made a presentation about the method first, and not jumping right into the action?

—/> Only couple of people worked at the prototype. This is a important problem to be solved on the next DBC. I think that some of these not-working people were tired, but for sure some of them just couldn’t made the way to work with us. It was hard and abstract for them. It was hard to do, because only I knew how to do physical game prototyping. I think that we should just make a much more simple game, because the game we were trying to prototype was a running type of game, and a very arcade one.

But in the end we had a plenty of good ol’ fun doing games and talking about them. Atmosphere was crazy good and I can’t wait for the next DBC. From the feedback I got many guys that were now on DBC want more! Of course there were couple of problems, but for the start I think it’s very good. Besides problems are good – I can now try my best to overcome them on the next DBC. I’m really glad I started the initiative like this and I’m really excited with the future!

And now… It’s time to think about the next DBC! Hell yeah!

Popularity: 61% [?]

DBC · gamedesign · prototyping · teaching · workshops

No comments yet.

<< DBC 2.0 is a history…

Diźajn Boost Camp >>