Levels of Abstraction

Having spent the past few weeks revising my graduation project proposal, I thought it would be a good idea to post how things were at this time.

As things stand now, I will be focussing on streamlining the development of exploratory prototypes. This means improving efficiency of idea generation and design translation to development, and in turn improving the relationship between initial idea and eventual implementation.

The idea is to abstract existing creative techniques, and heuristics extracted from the creative process of designers, to a limited amount of influences on the designer's thought process.

A Quick review of the steps during a creative process and the parts that I will be focussing on.

Phase 1 - The Problem
Phase 2 - The Ideas
Phase 3 - Evaluation
Phase 4 - Selection

Game design as a creative field is unique in the respect that the Problem and the Ideas both share a common origin: The Game Designer. Because of this, I will not be dealing as much with the problem area. Instead, I will choose a set of common starting points (themes, proven concepts, etc) and use those as the "problem space".

My project will deal more with the development of ideas during the idea phase, and how to evaluate them to develop 'good' ideas. This valorisation is, of course, very subjective which is why it will be based around design goals setup during the problem phase.

Well, back to work!