Week 3
Team Work
On Monday we had a lesson on teamwork and how one should go about working in a team and what works and what doesn’t work for an individual when it comes to group work.
Questions to Consider:
- What are your work preferences?
(alone/people/noise/quiet) - What are your strengths?
(analytical/creative) - What are your struggles?
(overthinker/time management) - How do you prefer to communicate?
(face2face, text, verbal, lists?)
Answers:
1. I can work alone and others equally. Alone I feel like I can focus more on work, however if I get distracted it’s difficult to regain focus. In a group I feel motivated to do my work but also I may get more distracted by being with a group (assuming I am friends with my group mates and not just peers, if we are only peers then this is no issue).
2. I believe I have strengths in analysis and creation. I can thoroughly scrutinize the work group members produce and attempt to scrutinize mine as well. Part of working in a team is, I believe, having people around to give feedback on what you produce allowing them to assist you in producing the best work possible.
3. I struggle with starting a task, it is difficult to open up a program or a website and begin working, however I feel when I have begun the work I can work rather efficiently. However, if the specific work I am doing is something that I find tedious and requires more thought to be put into it, I can find it very difficult to keep concentration.
4. I prefer communicating face to face as I believe that is the most efficient way of getting a message across. I think texting is also very good as it allows me to have a visual note of what we have discussed without needing to have to recall everything said; I can just look at the texts and remember.
On Feedback
There was also an emphasis placed on needing to essentially be “nice” when giving feedback to each other and that we should try to focus on what we do well rather than what we do badly. Personally, I adhere to this for other people but I want to be criticized without someone fearing that they’ll hurt my feelings. It’s better to be told that my work is bad than to be coddled and go on thinking that I am doing fine. Not that I often do particularly bad work, it is just that I want total honesty when someone is criticizing me. In the past I’ve had people who (in retrospect) feared being transparent with me on the work I was doing which then resulted in me being either complacent or not trying as hard as I would otherwise which would cause the quality of my final output to not be as high as it could otherwise have been. As a result, I find that criticism is significantly more valuable (to me) than praise. Others may work differently, and indeed I do believe being praised for what I do well helps motivate me too, however I prefer to be pushed rather than nudged.
Thursday Lesson
On Thursday we simply met with our groups and debrief with Sophie to gain feedback. At the time more emphasis was placed on some of my groupmates over myself so I didn’t need much feedback, I mostly discussed professional concerns with Sophie.
Work of the Week
I had mostly completed the gates for each realms with finishing touches being added later on. This week my tasks were to create a tile set and the tree of sorrow sprites and animations. I mostly succeeded in creating the tiles, particularly the floor and walls of the depression rooms. The process of making the tiles can be seen here on the tile page (insert embed link). As for the tree I reworked the sprite several times until I had an angle that fit the game’s perspective.
A mockup of a room in the dungeon using the tiles I created. I had a basic floor texture that had some rocky and crack textures overlaid in spots to give an impression of the cave’s environment. The walls were stone to further exemplify the fact that the depression realm was in a claustrophobic cave.
Redrafted the initial sideview of the tree of sorrow. This one was still too low in its perspective.
This was (as of now) the final draft, the perspective was a bit higher to complement the perspective of the game overall. It was not perfectly top-down however as I didn’t think that a tree of this kind would look particularly interesting when so little of it would be in view using a perfectly top-down perspective. This solution worked to show off the tree while still respecting the perspective of the game’s camera.