Michael Agustin
ABSTRACT
Every project in any aspect of the creative industry must start with an ideation process. The essence of this process is to allow rapid exploration of ideas with very little resource expenditure. For ideation to be successful an idea must be explorable in hours if not minutes. The tools that are used should be readily accessible to designers in the field. The video game industry is a production oriented industry and thus the majority of the technology in this industry has focused on production tools. Very little attention has been paid to the ideation stage in the game industry. In this paper we explore the cultural and technical reasons for this lack of focus on ideation within the video game industry.
We introduce the concept of game sketching. Game sketching is not a technology, rather it is a set of technologies and methodologies intended to encourage exploration at a very early stage. We present an overview of one tool we have developed and then discuss our users' experiences. We finish the paper with a set of examples of game sketching. In particular we include two examples of a game sketch where our technology was not used at all. The intention of this paper is to introduce the concept of game sketching, and in so doing to get people to ask questions early in the ideation stage.
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