CIM400.3 - Immutable Aeon Reflection Report
- Seth Callaghan
- Dec 6, 2023
- 15 min read
Contents
Introduction
In this report, I describe my process of creating ‘Immutable Aeon' (https://okkestudio.itch.io/immutable-aeon). I discuss what I learned from this experience, examples of problems I encountered, project achievements, and alternatives that presented themselves during this process. Finally, I discuss how I can apply these learnings to future experiences to do things differently. This will loosely follow Gibbs’ reflective cycle (Gibbs, 1988) while adding personalised touches that felt contextually appropriate. Throughout the semester, I have journaled an informal retrospective each week, which I have submitted for reference as Appendix B, to provide further context.
Description
Personally, while conceptualising the proposal, I decided to iterate an original grand concept that had been percolating for years. While this initiative as a whole is outside the scope of the assignments at the Post Graduate Certificate level, the plan to use this time to continue working on it and formalise the wider concept as a future game was appealing – particularly as the basis for my major masters work. I knew this would be a challenge, particularly from a production standpoint.
Had I not had such a solid idea before my commencement, I think I would have been left floundering. As a creative practitioner, it was an exhilarating way to fold in some other ideas around AI and space travel to the project, which allowed my setting to mature and evolve.
Product wise, using structured ideation sessions gave rise to more balanced factions, and the idea of the individual perspectives became more prominent. For example, in the previous iteration, Hypercorp were the “baddies” that the “Awoken” protagonist could challenge - now Hypercorp is a more realistic organisation, with more altruistic seeming goals - to save what’s left of humanity (as it sees it).
I was also able to introduce the idea of a benevolent AI faction that deviates from traditional ideas of a “homicidal AI” as found in films like Terminator or The Matrix. This stems from the idea that current AI is designed to be a helpful tool. While there is still friction between the factions, it’s not pretensive, which makes it feel more realistic and reinforcing Paski, D (2022)’s sentiment that the rise of the machines will never come.
Process wise, I mostly followed the same process that I would normally use for a creative project, but with myself in every role, allowing me to experience each issue as a student, and take away learnings directly.
I chose to adopt parts of a Design Sprint (IxDF, 2020) that I wouldn’t normally do in a professional capacity. While the Unpack, Sketch, Decide, and Prototype phases went relatively smoothly, I skipped over parts not needed or not possible for this project. The Test phase was skipped altogether at this point – it wasn’t until the final week that I was able to validate the whole user experience on itch.io. I would have loved to include all my ideas, but that wasn’t feasible in eight weeks. For this reason, I was glad for the proposal and scope, because I was able to prioritise and limit my output to just the necessary parts; it acted as a fixed point.
I incorporated Agile processes for iteration and feedback (Beck, K., et al., 2001), the workflow naturally followed a waterfall method due to the dependencies of the stages, the team (me), and assignment deadlines. This allowed me to directly experience and evaluate the hybrid framework – Scrumfall from different lenses, in a financially safer environment than the workplace, and take away some product management/ownership learnings (Theocharis G., et al., 2015).
Feelings
Personally, as a creative practitioner - this project addressed my current fears and put them in a hopeful fantasy context as a learning experience for the next generation.
AI was created to help us, not replace us, but the fear that AI would take the jobs of creatives is very real - with its current ability to generate a story, script, or artwork in seconds from a simple prompt. The central theme of climate change is also especially important to me, with the real life “point of no return” set to happen during my retirement years.
The ideas of alienation in young adults is especially close to me as well. As something I experienced in my youth and have overcome in adulthood, I’m now able to address this more maturely. Finding “your people” is important to this arc – for which the Awoken faction is an allegory. These were worked into the project, and while I haven’t fully formed the pillars, these are central inspirations.
The Product I’ve made – while initially worrying that it wasn’t enough – is now in a state I am (mostly) happy with. The quality of the work is present and subjectively on par with a lot of visual novels (VN). While I still have a way to go to develop my unique style, that will come in time. Considering this was only around 60-80 hours of art production, I can’t compare it to a finished product that’s been made over the course of four years by a team of four, such as the case with Andromeda six (https://wanderlust-games.itch.io/andromeda-six).
The Process of creating digital art is evolving for me. While I’ve been a sketcher and painter for 30 years, and I’ve produced a number of gallery-displayed works and commissions this way, the transition to digital art production has been hard. While I am trained as a graphic designer, and have worked in this field, digital Illustration is still new to me and involves a different process.
My design process has also evolved. Usually I like to “live in the world” in my imagination for a while – and the Design sprint was a fantastic way to shortcut this and set a deadline. It also meant that it wasn’t all consuming, and featured a defined beginning and end.
Evaluation
Personally, I am very happy with the world building that I have done on this project, and I have a much clearer, non-linear, version of the world living in my imagination. I can now run a tabletop roleplaying (TTRPG) campaign with these new ideas, and collaboratively tell stories that way.
I have a wealth of new concepts that I can draw, sketch, or [3D] model. I have also gained some major learnings from the unsuccessful parts of this experience. It’s one thing to imagine something, but quite another to express the idea. Ideas are cheap (Burgmer, 2019) but only gain value amongst adults if they are expressed through labour and effort. Expression of the vision is the goal of a creative producer or creative director, while technical execution is the role of the development team.
Burgmer’s article also raises deeper thoughts about whether the goal of artists and creatives is to express their own imagination and ideas or be a point of technical execution for artwork – and what influence capitalism has had. Has this always been the way or was it different in feudal times or ancient cultures before capitalism?
I feel that while the product I created was a great expression of some of the pivotal characters and places that I imagined, it’s the tip of an iceberg; there is still a huge backlog of documented ideas and dozens more unexpressed that are still forming. It will take time and effort to produce and gain value.
Finding a way to be more efficient with my artistic processes is key to this expression, with the development of my artistic style through continued practice as the primary approach. This can be demonstrated through the artwork produced even in this short time, as explained below in Analysis.
Forming a production team is another way to realise these ideas, and the concept of training an AI with my work and style, and to produce artistic output from a prompt, is also very appealing, and a way to maintain my unique vision without input from others.
Analysis
The first character artwork created was Daemonia, which required a considerable investment of time (14-16 hours), as I sought to determine the right style for this project. During a weekly review (Appendix B, Week 5), I was able to assess what did and did not work. I exceeded my deadlines, but the work was of great quality, so all three iterations were included in different poses.
I concluded that for the MVP, one pose would be enough to get a sense of the character. However, I found I was able to make the working files so that they could have other poses, expressions, and clothing. This effect was used on Ariadne’s glasses, on a separate layer in his hand. His tie is also on a separate layer, so he could wear a Chinese style suit, if time permitted. There wasn’t enough time to show this in the final work, but it will be possible for future iterations.
For the Product, my mentor and I discussed the decision of reducing the quality or descoping the amount of assets in the project. I’m very glad to have made the decision to reduce the number of assets, as I’m pleased with the current quality and recognise that more content will come only through applied effort and efficient processes.
I was also able to improve my technical processes once I found my artistic style and was able to enter an artistic flow state. As a result, it was easier to produce Ariadne, requiring only 8-10 hours, and Bear and their Bike also took around 10 hours. The increase in output resulted in being able to add more detail and include multiple elements in Bear’s scene. There is also a gun and rebreather sketched out in the working file, but these didn’t make it to the final work.
Conclusion
I now have a litmus of a production rate – known as a burn down in Agile. This can be used to extrapolate the effort needed for my remaining ideas and thus plan a more accurate project timeline. I have a solid understanding of the platform for the development of the game - a hybrid VN/TTRPG is something new, which would make for a unique market position.
I’ve discovered what extra skills would be needed for a team to make this work - illustration, writing, music, and game scripting. I’ve also had first-hand experience with some of these roles and know what skills I need to develop myself, and a better understanding of my role.
I’ve formed a solid vision, even if it hasn’t been entirely expressed in the assignment and have notes and hooks for other ideas to include in the next iteration. I’ve also validated my ideas and had user feedback about interest in visual novels and TTRPGs. With further effort, this project will able to enter the next stage of production.
Action Plan
Given the opportunity to redo it, I deliberately thought about my actions with a view to their improvement (Haton and Smith, 1995). I considered working on the assets for only one path – which has the downside of forcing story linearity and thus limiting branching choices, which is in opposition to the level of innovation I had for this project. However, this format may be more familiar to players, so further study will be required.
One of the aims was to incorporate a purely digital process – which wasn’t completely successful, as I still jotted notes and sketches in a physical journal. In the future, I might lean into this and research hybrid processes, i.e., sketching on paper and then finishing in Clip Studio Paint (CSP).
This may be faster for expressing my ideas and would also work well with a team of illustrators or generative AI who can execute a finished work from my sketches or prompts much faster than I can. I will need more practice with CSP and a better understanding of technical best practices. The next iteration of the project would be to add the unreleased characters and other ideas as referenced in Appendix C
References
Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit as cited at https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/reflecting-on-experience/gibbs-reflective-cycle
Theocharis, G., Kuhrmann, M., Münch, J., & Diebold, P. (2015). Is Water-Scrum-Fall Reality?
Beck, K., et al. (2001) The Agile Manifesto. Agile Alliance as cited at http://agilemanifesto.org/
Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. (2020, June 26). Make Your UX Design Process Agile Using Google’s Methodology. Interaction Design Foundation – IxDF as cited at https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/make-your-ux-design-process-agile-using-google-s-methodology
Burgmer, P., Forstmann, M., & Stavrova, O. (2019). Ideas are cheap: When and why adults value labor over ideas. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(5), 824–844.
Haton and Smith 1995 p 34 “Deliberately thinking about action with a view to its improvement”
Paksi, D. (2022). Technological singularity by culture; or the So Popular Concept of the Rise of the Machines That Will Never Come. Információs Társadalom, 22(4).
Appendix A: Timeline
Appendix B: Journal Entries
Each week I made a short entry as a sort of sprint retro that I’m familiar with – keep doing, stop doing, start doing. But was able to give it more feeling and a more free-flow style.
Week 1 – Goal: Concepting. I decided to iterate on my post humanity concept from a previous course and evolve this idea further. Some ideas have been kicking around in my mind about space travel, as well as what I’ve learned about AI over the last year - and with it, ideas for working in a new faction: a benevolent AI, and giving a benevolence to Hypercorp.
Their goal will be to find a new world on which to live. This would give more viability to the factions, as no one really wants to play an evil character. There’s no real goodies and baddies in real life, just views from external perspectives and opinions.
For example, even oil companies, while destroying the world from one perspective, are providing a vital service from another. Solar panels and electric cars, while being renewable, etc., still need quartz, neodymium, and lithium mines to produce those materials, and all the terrible ecological issues that go along with that.
Week 2 – Goal: Proposal Submission. Some brief research was done into the target market. It’s all over the place, and would mostly be defined by what platform it’s on. Although I really like the idea of making a side scroller or FPS video game, making this platform agnostic would be the best way – this is what made me choose to have the proposal as creative assets and aesthetics for an RPG source book, which can then be developed into a video game.
Reframing the rationale was tough, to include everything that I wanted to. I made a mood board and put in an excerpt from Ezri’s perspective (Ezri being the protagonist from the previous iteration). The concept of making a visual novel also appealed and may be feasible.
Week 3 – Goal: Design Sprint. I followed the google design sprint process carefully – Unpack, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and test. After looking into a bunch of visual novels, the amount of artwork needed is going be much more than is possible. 2-3 backgrounds for each scene, with around a dozen characters. Visual novels are basically made in iterations – in chapters. There are hundreds on itch.io with the cyberpunk tag. Andromeda Six is a popular one, which I dived into a fair amount.
It also looks most similar to what I want to make – it has non “R” romance and is a story-driven RPG. With seven characters, it is now up to version eight after four years (i.e., it has eight chapters, but the existing story has also been tweaked, and bugs were fixed, etc.). It also has three spin offs and is supported financially through Patreon and Merch and has a team of around five developers.
Because I’ll be targeting young adults (I’ve put 16 in the proposal, but realistically, 13 year olds will want to play it too) I want to steer away from the romance elements common in visual novels, and more towards RPG elements. I pivoted to using this framework to make backgrounds and characters for a visual novel, which can be separated out, and different expressions, clothing, hairstyles, etc. can all be applied. Or, backgrounds could be layered using windows. (Ed: in retrospect (see Week 6) this may have been a huge mistake, because this is not the original proposal.)
Week 4 – Goal: Concept Art. I fell down the ideation rabbit hole and crossed too far into writing. I started mapping out the storyline for a visual novel. I’m a solid writer as far as short stories and concepts go, but as a producer, I would hire a writer to do the ins and outs. I need to be sketching ideas and creating a vision. I pivoted a few times and reiterated this weekend, meaning I’m ahead of schedule – I have dozens of ideas, but only a few sketches, which is a bit worrying.
Week 5 – Goal: Review and Iteration. Art production is taking longer estimated to produce to the level that I want, so I’m falling behind. I only gave myself three hours each for six characters (with different poses and expressions) and six environments. I spent 14 hours making Daemonia – she was also made in three different styles, and I need to decide which fits best.
I’ve gone over the ten hours allotted this week, and with Lauren in hospital it’s been a lot of “hurry up and wait”. So drawing got my mind off things. I got into a rhythm making Ariadne – who was originally female, but changed to male for gender balance.
For now, these three “best friend” characters will need to be the MVPs, along with only one environment that gives the most feeling of what it is. Two solutions to this are: reduce the quality or reduce the amount of assets. AI: Hypervisor Vim, Corp: The Board, Dome Dwellers: Mad Aaron and The Clans, along with the integration room, Bath House, Garden, the Beaches, C’tawn, and the rest of the Netscape.
Week 6 – Goal: Finish Character Assets. After realising I may not be able to make all the art I wanted, I changed Ariadne’s concept to be a male for more gender balance – I figure in 300 years’ time, gendered names won’t really matter. My technical process also improved and I started formulating a consistent style - which is visible in Bear and their bike. This week I didn’t get much done while looking after Lauren while she recovers from surgery.
Week 7 – Goal: Finish Environment Assets. Anne made me realise I need to take a step back and stick to the proposal. The proposal isn’t for assets for a visual novel, it’s for “platform agnostic assets and aesthetics and an outline of the general story and characters of the game”. I need to stick to making the source book that focuses on the rationale. After I drafted the source book, it became clearer as to what I needed to make for it.
Week 8 – Goal: Finish Turn arounds. I’m not doing turn-arounds anymore. New goal: Finish all the assets – I’m still behind. I’ve realised it’s not just the source book or the assets – I need to submit the whole package. It dawned on me that the best way to present this is directly on an itch.io page where it would naturally be released once finished anyway – and for this I’ll need a short description and pitch video. I iterated again. For example, “Survivors” were renamed “Dome Dwellers”. I reeled in the concept of Hypercorp terraforming Mars, and put more focus on the isolation that dome dwellers face.
I also wanted to hint at the Awoken faction, as this is important to the overall story line and is the twist that brings hope. I don’t want to spoil the twist in the “trailer”, but also need to include it for the assignment – so there is a mention of a “sightings of mutants” in the source book, and an unexplained turn-around of Ezri (an Awoken protagonist from previous iteration) features here as a teaser.
Week 9 – Goal: QA and Amends, and Packaging for Delivery. Smashing through the finishing touches to hit the submission deadline. The source book is nowhere near as detailed as I want – it just outlines the three best friend characters and an overview of the three starting locations. There is so much more I want to put in here for the next iteration. I put together a pitch video, quickly explaining what a visual novel is, the history, and factions. I was able to add in stock imagery to get a better look and feel. The content produced will fulfil the assignment, but is not everything I wanted for my original vision. I’m going to need at least six months working ten hours per week to get this to the MVP I want.
Week 10 – Goal: Release. Time to set my creation free into the world. It’s a huge relief, and while I’m not happy with the amount of content, I’m fairly happy with the quality. I feel it was the right move to descope the amount of content, rather than reduce the quality.
Appendix C: Summary of Other Ideas
CHARACTERS
AI: Sudo, Hypervisor Vim, and forks
Corp: The Board, Lupine, Vulpy
Dome Dwellers: Mad Aaron and the clans
Estimate: 70hrs
SPRITES
Equipment for the characters to interact with:
More bikes, some hover cars/corporate drones, comms devices, glasses, augmetics, and visual representations of various computing terms - drivers, scripts, masks, bots.
Estimate: 40hrs
ENVIRONMENTS AND LOCATIONS
The Netscape: The root directory – the main street, nginx – engine ex, full of activity, with the feeling of a factory, home – a completely blank space with tools and utilities, USR-, tmp – a garbage dump, boot, lib – a library but kernel modules and utilities instead of books, cron – a whole bunch of clocks and timers
Estimate: 70 hours
Other Domes: The Beaches, C’Tawn, and the Shire
Estimate: 50+ hours each
Parrah: The Diner, the Clan hub - full of jet bikes, The main street, the warehouse district, the courthouse, the undercity, etc. These are all ideas still in my head that need to be formulated into artwork. I would use actual references from Parramatta, NSW for this. This lets a greater story be told.
Estimate: 70 hours
Then working out Utopia – a “cloud city” shot, a balcony, or walkway above the clouds, a garden and bathhouse, to show the opulence that’s taken for granted – all with augmented reality (AR) overlays.
Estimate: 60 hours
Central to most of the characters will be the Outskirts and the Brambles, where the twist will happen, and the main characters’ stories start to merge, they find the Awoken resistance, and realise that they are Awoken themselves - able to withstand the new atmosphere and with special powers/mutations - with this new knowledge, they loop back through each of the other locations.
Estimate: 30 hours – more time to brainstorm just what this will look like – 40 hours
PLOT HOOKS
These will be short stories, or even “adventure modules” important for TTRPG development:
· Abandoned Oxygen producing algae dams that need to be fixed or repossessed.
· Ocean snake generators that have either gone offline or need to be salvaged.
· Rogue android bases – either to rescue the trapped egos, clear it from danger, or salvage parts.
· Find and enter Omegon’s core to fix a bug or implant a script.
· The Board room to meet the Maker/CEO could be a high level/end game plot hook.
· Mars Colony could be a future complete expansion, just for corpos, with new characters, locations, and plot hooks. Other pivotal locations around the world could also be expansions. What’s happened in Europe? Sky pirate expansion with blimps. How about the outback? “Car wars” style, and fighting over water, and “tunnel rats” taken to living underground.
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