What next?
My experience in week twelve
The source material this week was aimed at looking back at what I have learned so far and considering what aims and aspirations I have for the rest of my study.
There was an insightful Game a Week Presentation by Adriel Wallick taken from the Europe Game Developers Conference in 2014. She opens with a challenge she faced when she left her job to become an independent game developer, she references how she found herself with lots of free time but found it hard to achieve anything of value with this time. The rest of the presentation is focused on her solution to this problem that was to create a game a week for almost one year and the benefits that she found by adopting this challenge. She talks about the benefits of releasing the game at the end of each week, she recalls how at the beginning she found putting her name against her work quite terrifying, but how releasing regularly helped to break down the fear of this and relieved some of the pressure she put on herself for her work to be faultless, she also notes the value of getting user feedback and references how analysing this has helped her to improve her games. She mentions how she found it hard to find new ideas as a result of being clouded by the same ideas and how building a game a week gave her the freedom to be more creative by not fixating too much on any idea for longer than the week itself. She ends her description of the game a week process by speaking about the value she has found in reflecting upon her experience of creating each game and how she would round off each week with a blog post about the inspiration for the idea, what went right, what went wrong and how in doing this she was able to identify trends of problematic design and time management behaviour that she could go on to remedy and improve her practice.
Initially I thought I might not be able to relate to the presentation as the challenge of having lots of time but not knowing how to use it couldn’t be further from my situation; my schedule is already packed full with the day-to-day responsibility of co-running Antiblanks, being a CTO for Plays and Roadle, trying to be a good husband and father, and (of course) trying to get a masters degree! However once I settled into the presentation I realised that the message is about how to achieve more of value in the time that you have and how Adriel Wallick achieved this with her game a week. In the presentation she references how creating a game a week gave her a solid attainable goal and how having this deadline each week applied artificial pressure onto her to achieve something of value. Hearing this reinforced for me the importance of the SMART actions that I’ve created over the last twelve weeks on the course and how these will serve as self-imposed deadlines to keep me on track. The other part of the presentation which really struck a chord was hearing of how much the speaker enjoyed the regular reflection and the benefit that doing this brought to her practice. I couldn’t agree more with this, I’ve always self-reflected to improve my work, but being forced to reflect on a weekly basis in written form in my course journal has encouraged me to go much deeper and has really helped me to identify where I’ve failed both in my work during the week and previously in the past, then to analyse why I’ve failed, and finally encouraged me to set attainable goals to correct this and give myself a better chance of succeeding in future.
Tying this to my project
My over-arching goal was always to exit this course with an application that could be successful. I had hoped that the learnings from my study on the course would help to fill the gaps in my knowledge acquired from my years of industry experience and give me a better understanding of all the elements required to achieve this. The course so far has lived up to this and over the last twelve weeks I’ve gained a much better understanding of what makes an app successful, this being that the app must be relevant in the market place, have a wide audience, have a convincing value proposition, have a viable monetisation strategy, and be well executed with stickiness to promote re-use. Further to this the course has given me deeper insight into the tools and processes available to succeed in each of these areas and forced me to create SMART actions to apply these learnings to the development of my application on the course and my applications there after.
I feel that my ‘Escape Room’ application idea has great potential to be successful as so far my research has proven there to be a market for the idea and that no one is currently claiming this space. My aim at this point is to continue with the research and development for this application, and as my SMART actions in previous posts suggest, I am focusing my immediate efforts into doing further market and audience research to refine the idea; so far my audience research has been focused on the owners of Escape Spaces themselves so I am currently trying to speak to avid players to gain insight into what they want. Though unlikely at this point, being that the owners have given me some insight into this already, I am mindful that this part of the research could indicate that the players don’t want an app to embellish the existing analogue experience of playing an Escape Space. With this in mind, from a development perspective I am currently focusing my efforts on furthering my tool kit of reusable abstract components (such as user auth, account management, form and utility components) built into my boilerplate/s mentioned in this post so that when the research is complete I have the tools ready to quickly piece together a prototype for this idea if it proves still viable. Being that these components are highly abstract and reusable, if the idea proves not viable then these can be used to prototype the next idea and any app idea thereafter. All being well with the remaining ‘Escape Room’ audience research my intention is to create an investment deck alongside the prototype in 2019-Q1 so that I can try to get V1 of the project funded this year in 2019-Q2. All of my ‘Escape Room’ focused SMART actions over previous journal posts support this goal.
Summary
In this post I’ve briefly described the GDC Game a Week Presentation by Adriel Wallick. I’ve then gone on to reference elements within the presentation that I could relate to and highlighted how having solid attainable goals and practicing regular reflection are both key components to achieving more of value in the time I have. Finally I’ve summarised my experience on the course so far, outlined my over-arching aim of exiting with a successful application and outlined my current focus with regard to the ‘Escape Room’ app. I’ve created no new SMART actions this week as I feel comfortable that my actions from previous weeks combine nicely to support my overall aim outlined in this post.