Week 1: Practical Skills

As it is the first week of the project, I have not produced any practical work for the project. I have, however, been assigned the job of creating 3 different types of towers for our chosen game, tower defence, based on the theme of ‘Fantasy/Fairytales’.

With my task in mind, I have decided to start creating a Pinterest board to get ideas on what I visually want to represent. I would like to delve into three different sub-sections for my towers, one being based on fairies, one based on dark magic and one based on impossible magic, such as floating objects.

Week 1: Starting a New Year

After coming back from summer break, we started to work on our first project- ‘Fairytales’, of the year. I have developed ideas surrounding our topic of ‘The Pagemaster’, to create a bigger picture of what we want to achieve over the course of the project. The ideas I have considered consist of:

• A mythology style book created around the general aesthetic of a popular mythological tale (Such as Pandora’s Box or Zeus), or alternatively a design and (book) character based around several different mythological stories.
• A western themed book with models and scenery that is accurate to older western history.
• A tower defense styled game, potentially tailored to the mythology book.
• A temple run styled game, potentially tailored to the western book.

To start off the project, we created several different mindmaps and moodboards relating to the film ‘The Pagemaster’ in order to gather inspiration straight from the source.

Week 1: Research

As a continuation to the project this week, I was assigned the task of researching the myth ‘Hercules and the Twelve Labours’ to help spark ideas of enemies for the ‘Mythology’ theme. This research will be passed onto whoever is going to work on the theme in order to give them some insight prior to creating concepts in order to ease research on their behalf. This specific myth was chosen as a topic because of the wide range of beasts and challenges Hercules had to face, which could all be used and conceptualised to fit into the Mythology tower defence.

Document with research:

Metin (2012). The Twelve Labors of Hercules. [online] Symbols and Their Meanings – Mythology and Gods – Mythical Creatures. Available at: https://mythologian.net/the-twelve-labors-of-hercules/.

Week 1: Planning and Production

In order to start off our project in a organized manner, I created a table of tasks that I will have to fulfill to get a clear lead for the beginning of the unit. By creating this table, I can refer back to my tasks with simplicity and clarity.

Week 1: Problem Solving

Theoretical

• WordPress webpage did not function correctly upon installation of template. In order to solve the issue, I re-imported the template, changed the viewing settings to ‘horizontal desktop’ mode, along with choosing a different layout setting for the template to apply to my website, which allowed me to view my sub-categories without any issues.
• My game-related image on my main page of the WordPress website failed to display/load correctly. Despite refreshing the page consistently, the image still failed to load in. To solve my issue, I had to substitute a different photo in order to decorate my page.

• In the process of creating my WordPress, I stumbled across duplicate categories (ie. double Week 1, Week 2, etc.) and to solve the issue, I went into the website settings and manually deleted all of the categories that were dupes until my page was clear of doubles.

Practical

• I am yet to encounter any practical issues as I have not started any practical work, but once I have created or started working on a practical creation, I will note down any issues and solve them accordingly.

Skills Audit (September 2021)

In order to track my current progress and skills, I filled out a skills audit for me to refer back to frequently. As a result of understanding my strengths and weaknesses, I will be able to improve and strive to do better in the categories that I personally believe I am weaker in.