Beginnings – 6/7/19

Beginnings

By Griffin Beels, Brown University ’21

Hi! I am a rising junior at Brown University, participating in SIP, MassDiGI’s Summer Innovation Program. We’ve been in session since the middle of May, so we’re starting to get into the meat of game production!

Within these last three weeks, we’ve been moving very fast-paced (while having ample opportunities to ask questions), and truly have accomplished a lot already.

Griffin Beels celebrating National Donut Day during SIP19.

First, we split off into groups — all of the developers were placed on teams for the rest of the summer. I’m on Team Cherry, and am actually the producer! This means that I seek to coordinate within our team to determine how we want to progress. That is, asking questions about our goals or knowledge, and using that to recognize an ideal path. I have an extraordinary amount to learn, and I hope to improve as much as I possibly can as a producer this summer, to make sure my teammates and I are working together with synergistic efficiency.

Next, we determined as a group what type of game we wanted to pursue. Our group chose to look at “endless runners,” or games wherein you keep playing forever until you hit an obstacle (e.g., Jetpack Joyride, Temple Run, Subway Surfers). We conducted market research to construct a taxonomy of endless runners, which was in essence a massive guideline of what goes into an endless runner.

After we constructed our taxonomy, we constructed 3 “white boxes,” or essentially rough drafts of a few ideas that we had — and got to present our white boxes to elementary school students in the Worcester area, which was an awesome experience. One student in particular made me smile extremely hard when he celebrated after making it to the next platform in one of our white boxes.

Finally, we have officially moved onto production; as such, we are refining our code bases, art styles, and designs to start building an awesome game from the ground up.

Everyone’s incredible, and I am super excited to not only work with such talented artists and programmers, but also get to know everyone and learn from them! I hope the summer keeps being great!