Proposal feedback and my response

After handing my proposal in, (it can be read here), the lecturers have provided me with very helpful feedback, which I'm willing to present here. They have also asked some questions which I'm happy to answer.

1st marker:

"Some of your comments are wholly subjective and, in some cases, wildly inaccurate and subject to confirmation bias. You must learn to research and to discipline your mind. You are going to have to change the way you think if you want any chance of succeeding with this dissertation."

I will do my best from now on, to back my statements up with academic referrencing.

"After our discussion, your dissertation proposal began to coalesce and your proposal is sound.

The ‘mass market’ in not a viable market sector, and is impossible to accurately design for. It is, however, viable when discussing UX in a general way, which is what you appear to be doing without referring explicitly to UX. Your observations on UX are relevant, but superficial, and need expanding on. You will need to refine your demographic in order to resolve countless questions related to pacing, mood, theme, mechanics, interaction, narrative, art style, player environment, play-style, etc., all of which will, to varying degrees, play some part in the succes or failure of your product/s."

I will go into more detail discussing what audience my game is specifically for in my future posts.

"Your analysis of job adverts is good. Your marking criteria are also good. However, I am unclear why you are proposing to develop more than a single game. I imagine that you intend to demonstrate that you can reproduce your success, and that you want the flexibility to develop further code-related skills. If so, you need to explicitly include these goals in your proposal and learning outcomes."

The reason why I want to develop more than one prototype is simply because that way I will have to code more, giving me more experience and increasing my programming knowledge of C#. This will be especially true if each prototype will require different mechanics and coding techniques.

"I like what you are attempting to achieve with this dissertation Patryk. If you are successful, you will be highly employable. However, you are currently prone to working in a superficial and uninformed manner, thereby severely impeding your chances of success. You have correctly identified many of the theoretical components of Bushnell’s Law, but are still a very long way away from being prepared for this dissertation."

2nd marker:

"The proposal is lopsided.  You talk about the games being easy to learn and hard to master as a starting point for your own game development. I know you want to make a twitch game but then very little else.  What is the scale and scope for this game, who is the audience?"

My plan is to create a very simple prototype which has no more than two or three mechanics. This is because I don't want to over estimate my project, and spend much longer on it than I thought I would, especially considering that I've only started learning C#, and anything can delay my predictions. My general audience is mobile gamers, but I'll go into more detail soon.

"You want to focus on programming, but again there is a lack of specificity here. What kinds of skills you expect to develop. If you make a second prototype what do you think you will code then?"

By the end of this dissertation I want to be able to code twitch based games and publish them on mobile devices. For example my first prototype requires me to code object movement until a collision with another object takes place, and an object interaction when the screen is tapped. For my second prototype I will design a prototype with a different set of mechanics, which will require a different approach of coding, giving me more experience as a programmer.

"Your reference to the job component of the rationale is very cursory. I want to know what you looked at, what you found and how your dissertation matches up to this, I don’t mind being referred back to the blog, but it is not a substitute for a reasonable statement on the proposal."

I have looked at job adverts which have the following requirements:

• Possess an understanding of mobile game development and operating systems (iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8)
• Experience in game development with Unity 2D/3D, C++, C#
• Computer Science/Software Engineering degree or equivalent work experience
• Experienced with Unity on at least one published title
• Excellent knowledge of C++, C# or Java
• Excellent grasp of object oriented development
• Created a previous Unity game or demo

I'm hoping that after this dissertation, my understanding of C# will improve enough, for me to consider looking for a programming job, which asks for the skills shown above.