Tristan Atkinson 507 AAA Dev Blog
Week 1- 17/01/2024 - 23/01/2024
This project is meant to simulate a AAA working environment- our team consists of 23 people including both developers and producers: 10 Designers, 3 Programmers, 4 Artists, 4 Audio and 2 Producers/Business.
To begin the first Week on Wednesday, the whole team collaborated in small groups to come up with brief Game Concepts to pitch to the rest of the Team. I had an Idea I’d previously come up with for a Stealth-Roguelike Game where the player can play as a selection of small Goblin creatures which stand at a few inches tall with different abilities which offer different playstyles. The goal of the Game would be to farm xp and different finite slingshot ammunition from enemies in the giant kitchen before activating the target loot to spawn the boss before progressing to the next stage. Being spotted by the roaming human NPCs would prematurely spawn an extra boss enemy.
My concept was among the final four that were voted on, however it was beaten out by just a couple votes by another concept- a parkour/platformer racing game.
I was initially slightly disappointed, as the chosen idea didn’t seem as interesting or unique to me, personally- however my concept is more fitting as an Indie title so the chosen concept will likely be more suitable for this project, as its goal is to simulate a AAA working environment.
As someone who spends more time playing Indie Games, the project concept didn‘t initially grab me, but I am confident in our team’s ability to flesh out the idea and make it something I can be proud to work on. Regardless of whether or not I feel this way, AAA development usually offers far less individual creative freedom than indie development, with big decisions usually being delegated to the Discipline and Project Leads.
The prospective Discipline Leads pitched themselves to the rest of the team and were voted on by the two prospective Project Leads and the rest of their discipline team. I put myself forward for Design lead, however I was not chosen. The Project Lead justified their decision by saying my skills as a Narrative Designer and Writer are more important to be utilised in said role.
As the Design team is far larger than the others, a Design Lead and Deputy Design lead were chosen.
Despite the fact I wanted the role, I am happy with and agree with the selection, as both the designers chosen are very capable and people I trust in decision making and management positions.
I was also happy with the unanimous decision in the election of the main project lead out of our two Game Business students. Working with our Project Lead last term, I know for a fact she has great management skills and is good with people, knowing when to take what tone with others- along with a good understanding of Games.
While the other Business Student will be in a management role, I am glad he is not the de facto Project Lead, as with my experiences and what I’ve seen of others’ experience with him, he comes across as unreasonable and provocative, as well as not having a good understanding of Games as a whole. This is a skill I will have to face especially in both AAA and Indie development- working with people you don’t mesh with. I feel like when faced with friction with another Team Member, I can conduct myself in a calm and collected manner to avoid escalating the situation and leading to even more friction that may impact development.
From the things I heard about his Indie Project last term, I am not confident in both him and some of the other Designers’ ability to conduct themselves in such a way towards one another, so I have made a point to myself early on to stay out of their conflicts to not involve myself or accidentally escalate, leaving these situations to people in higher positions of authority.
The following day, I waited to be assigned my specific formal role in the team, as I wanted to be sure I was focussing my thoughts on the aspects of Design I would be working on.
I was happy to be given the role of Narrative Designer, as this is an aspect of Game Design I enjoy greatly and have been reading up on recently- specifically World-Building and Character creation / Dialogue.
Creating Original Characters has been a hobby of mine for most of my teenage years, and is a field I have seen much personal improvement in over those years, so I am excited to work on these aspects of the Project.
The Indie Project we took part in last Term was fun and fulfilling, however I think that the increase in hierarchy and organisation in this AAA simulation project will help make development smoother- as a problem we faced last term was the Design Team not having a unified vision of the project and a lot of confusion arising surrounding this.
In our Indie Project, I had the opportunity to experiment with and grow skills outside of my comfort zone, mainly 3D modelling and texturing; however in AAA development, developers generally stay more confined to their designated role that is selected based on their skill sets.
I enjoyed the experimentation and broadness of indie Development, but I am excited to work in a department which reflects my pre-existing strengths and skills to do work I can confidently say I am proud of.
On Friday, I got to work creating some basic, open-ended plot hooks relating to the potential settings the Game might take place in based on previous discussions about the setting. I made sure to keep these ideas short and somewhat vague to give them room for development, while making sure each had a strong plot hook which would engage people. These ideas were usually just 3 or so sentences long, ending with some kind of question to get people thinking about how the idea could take form.
One concept I had and expanded on due to my own interest in it, involved a World where Media companies began to use AI extensively for the creation of entertainment quickly and cheaply, garnering massive amounts of money and eventually creating a media monopoly, with Humans being forced to work in non-creative industries. To accommodate this change, cybernetic enhancements were developed to increase worker productivity- enhancing physical attributes such as strength and speed.
The main character would be a woman working in some kind of industry which she received a speed enhancement from. When coming home from work after being forced to work overtime, she bumps into a wounded woman. Upon checking her arm, she notices that beneath her skin is metallics and circuits. The robot begs her to take her home, fearing she is not safe outside. The Main Character is concerned but obliges.
She learns from the robot that the media monopoly has been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence that can feel and experience empathy to enhance the quality of their creative work.
This was a bulk of the short, rough outline for the story I made today; the concept could explore themes and concepts such as the ongoing Generative AI asset creation debates in the creative industries, as well as “can artificial intelligence gain sentience”.
Despite this idea being far more fleshed out than my few-sentence hooks, I think there's a lot of room for change and growth in this story concept.
The following day on Saturday, the Design team got together in a Zoom meeting to discuss setting, theme, main mechanics etc. so we could create MVP / asset lists for the Team.
Despite the fact that many Designers couldn’t make it / didn’t respond to messages planning the meeting, 6 of the 10 designers were present.
When discussing themes, we decided that due to art-related constraints with the art team not having experience in creating high-fidelity high poly assets, we wouldn’t be using a cyberpunk setting. This meant that the idea I had begun to flesh out wouldn’t work, which was the precise reason I had kept my previous ideas short and varied across themes.
The Setting / Theme we decided upon was inside of a Computer. Collectively, we came up with the idea of the player playing as an Avatar of an AI / Virus looking for information on a PC to get dirt on somebody. Through discussion, we expanded on this idea slightly- the Avatar is created by a neglected Child of a wealthy family, who is looking for evidence of their shady practices to take them down. The plan is for levels to take place inside folders, with the first goal of the level to locate specific files which the player would be able to read parts of to gradually piece together the story; and the second goal of the level would be to escape an activated firewall which will kill the player if they take too long escaping.
The concept of the AI Avatar seeing the Hacker as a parental figure could also be used to draw parallels between the way the Hackers was treated and the way they treat the AI- which is something I plan to discuss with the other Narrative Designer tomorrow.
The meeting was overall productive, despite some going round in circles with people overcomplicating the ideas slightly. Some of the earlier ideas mentioned by other designers involved the Avatar not having its own free will and simply doing what the Hacker tells it- however I noted that something along these lines would create a disconnect with the player and make them unmotivated to carry out the tasks in the levels, as well as dampening the ability for the player to connect with the avatar.
The design lead made notes for everything we talked about, which will be useful to not forget any details of our plan and cause misunderstandings later. I mentioned to the other Narrative Designer that we should set up a call the following day to come up with more in-depth ideas for the story.
I made plans with the other Narrative Designer to talk more about this idea and how we can flesh it out the following day. The morning of the next day we received a message from the Project Lead, asking Designers to stay within their specific role as not to ‘overdesign’ the Game. I somewhat agree with this sentiment- I think it was good having as many designers as could attend to contribute to the concept of setting plot mechanics etc. Many of the Designers, even myself at times, have a tendency to get carried away when designing concepts and forget about the scope. However, I think this term, the Designers should have an opportunity to at least somewhat step outside of their primary role, as each of us have valuable skills to offer in multiple areas.
The following Monday; me, the other Designers and some other members of the team were having some concerns about management and role assignment. The audio lead had told me that they were concerned that the Project Managers did not know as much about the skills of the audio students- as well as this, certain designers had been assigned to supervise the programmers as mechanical designers despite these two designers having next to no experience coding in C#.
The primary design lead spoke to the project lead- and initially the criticism apparently wasn’t taken well, however after the project lead had a chance to calm down they allowed leads to be more flexible in changing roles and disciplines like audio lead assigning them herself.
This is an improvement from last term, when we were too timid to voice concerns as our team members are also our friends. This was something we discussed in our ‘post-mortem’, reflecting on how many of us neglecting to bring up glaring script issues from the project lead caused a lot of conflict / setback.
Openness is one of the core values of Agile Development and ensures any issues / concerns anyone has about the Project and its progression is brought to light swiftly and is dealt with, leading to a far smoother development. This is a valuable lesson we learned from last term, and it is already leading to a far more optimistic path of development.
Week 2- 24/01/2024 - 30/01/2024
We Began this week with a Scrum Meeting with the whole Team. A reflection meeting was held with just the leads the night before. In the Scrum meeting we discussed role assignment among other things. The Project Lead suggested that the designers should be able to contribute outside of their primary role, with the exception that only myself and the other narrative designer should be contributing to the story to keep it as coherent as possible. I agree with this decision, as with more of the design team involved in the story it absolutely would have suffered for it. As far as I know, a vast majority of the Design Team have little to no writing experience, and even the other narrative designer had trouble at first understanding that the role of the Story in this game would be secondary to the gameplay, and instead of tangible, traditional character arcs, the player would piece together information that they find while playing.
After consulting the Design Lead to get him back on track, we began working on a Milanote board to start drafting our story idea.
I have used Milanote in the past for Character sheets, story outlining etc. it's a great tool for writing so I convinced the other narrative designer that we should use it, as it would allow us to easily organise and lay out different aspects of the narrative design, such as character sheets.
The idea that we had refined from the original is that the family, atop a large tech-firm, had begun developing AI models for various uses. Many of the uses would be a force for good, such as making healthcare more efficient; however many of these uses were bad such as automating a lot of work which would likely lead to mass-layoffs, and military advancement.
There is a member of the family (Currently referred to as ‘The Hacker’) who considers themselves righteous and takes it upon themself to steal one of the AI frameworks and use it against the family. They use the AI to go through their files and find evidence of these AI and the harm they can cause workers- which will be what is happening in the game, with the player controlling the AI Avatar.
The Hacker would be a person who finds it hard to see the grey in morality, following the black vs white and wants to take action into their own hands, which we will take into account when filling in their character sheet.
If the Game hypothetically had a larger scope, this character could create an interesting dynamic for the player and offer interesting and difficult questions for the player to make, in terms of who they want to side with.
I created a basic Character Sheet for the hacker that we began filling in as well as a template for the file texts with prompts to ask “When” “Where” and “Why”; as in what level / where in the level these would be found, and what information do we want these to show the player.
As of yet, we have not received our student licences for Jira or Confluence, so we have not been physically able to implement these into our Agile Framework yet. In the meantime, we have been using Trello, Slack and Asana as Project Management tools.
Upon receiving a message from a Producer that we have a Jira to join, I made a comment saying “oh nice I didn’t think we’d been given Jira yet” they responded with what I perceived as a somewhat passive-aggressive comment about me “starting a conversation in #software links”. I chose not to respond to avoid generating any unnecessary friction within the Team.
Week 3- 31/01/2024 - 06/02/2024
To begin week 3 we held a Scrum meeting where the discipline leads briefly answered three questions to the producers: ‘What has been done the previous week?’ ‘What is planned to be done this week?’ and ‘Is there anything else you need to discuss with anyone specifically?’
This meeting structure is a vast improvement from those we had last term, which would drag on for far too long and waste time people could be using for development. Having Discipline leads who can converse with their team allows for Scrum meetings to cover broader topics much faster than how we did it last term, with the whole team discussing everyone’s individual issues one by one; making them far more efficient.
This Week I was tasked with expanding on the plot idea me and the other Narrative Designer had come up with the previous week, as well as helping the Level Designers blueprint an initial design for the first non-tutorial level.
I noticed, looking at the Jira in the following days, that the only task I had been assigned for previous weeks was ‘Plot Hooks’ and any tasks I had for this week either weren't on the Jira or didn’t have me added as an assignee. I asked the primary Design Lead about this, as I was concerned I would not receive any credit for my work. She reassured me that the Secondary Producer had done the Design section of the Jira without much understanding of what was going on, and that she would talk to him about taking over responsibility for this part of the Jira so that our tasks were fairly and properly distributed.
On the first day of Week 3, me and the other Narrative Designer began expanding on our previous ideas. I wrote up a quick summary of our updated ideas. This outlined our initial Character ideas and motivations, as well as their relations / plans and how the player would uncover this information in greater detail. Among this, I had an idea that collecting a file would unlock it to be read in a separate menu accessible from the main menu, so as not to interrupt the flow of Gameplay when the player collects a file. This would also give room for potential secret files to be implemented into the game to uncover replayability of each level.
Upon reading my summary, the Project Lead requested that I fill out some more detailed character sheets for each character, specifically the Hacker, as well as going into more detail about how they treat the AI Avatar and their specific motivations.
The Character sheet I began working on includes facets of the character such as economic background, education and level, intelligence and general attitude (among many others).
In the following days of the week, I joined an Audio call with two of the other Level Designers to work on a Blueprint for a first level (after the tutorial). They updated me on their previous work for the tutorial section of the game and how they had planned to introduce the movement mechanics to the player.
The tutorial area has a lot of space for the player to play around with the movement mechanics without danger of failing the level, which is an effective way of easing new players into your mechanics. In this level you can progress straight to the extraction tutorial which is more dangerous if you choose. This means that players can take learning the mechanics at a pace which fits them.
When beginning to come up with a first level, one of the level designers undertook an odd workflow, trying to define how many enemies would be in the level before considering any of the obstacles etc.
We wanted to focus on how the movement mechanics can be strung together in combination to put the dynamics of our mechanics at the forefront of our level design, as we only had the timescale to create a small vertical slice of our game. Among these ideas, I suggested we have a section where the player would have to use their lengthened slide-into-jump to reach a wall they must wall run across to reach the other side.
Seeing as I didn’t have much to do following the level Blueprint and Character sheets / plot expansion, I began looking into Jira more, both for the benefit of this project and my 508 AAA Design Project. I wouldn’t be assigning tasks for this project but for the latter, as the Primary Lead I would have to get used to using Jira as a manager.
Jira is a more advanced and complex program than the other Kanban program I have used previously, Trello. But with that complexity comes more tools to help organise tasks and work, including but certainly not limited to setting dependencies which lead to the completion of certain tasks locking others. I feel that a greater understanding of the Jira software will be a great benefit to me in undergoing Agile development in this project and ones to follow, as it allows me to more effectively use Kanban in Agile frameworks to ensure smoother project planning and development.
(I would later learn that only the Producers have been given access to a premium Jira subscription so I would be unable to use Jira for our 508 AAA Design Project)
Week 4- 07/02/2024 - 13/02/2024
Over the previous week, I was experiencing some creative block which hindered my ability to work on the Character sheets. I admit that this shouldn’t have been an excuse for my work to be lacking this week, and I eventually dragged myself to my desk to work. The Character sheet outline I use has a lot of useful prompts for things to get on the page, so I was able to power through most of it. These offered information to myself and any other Narrative Designers / script writers including the Characters' goals, background, style of speech and values/vices: all of which is valuable information to have especially when writing prose/dialogue for that character.
In the meantime, I decided that I should be trying to gather more writing experience, since Narrative Design is an avenue of Game Design I hold great interest in. To practise my writing, I picked up a previous Fantasy Novel project of mine, as I am especially in need of practise and experience writing prose and dialogue to be a more effective Narrative Designer.
In terms of scrum this week, we didn’t have a formal meeting from either of the Producers, as the Project Lead was on Jury Duty and I’m not sure if the other producer fully understands what we’re doing in terms of development; furthermore, we were informed we were conducting two-week sprints. Next week's reading week, which meant we likely wouldn’t hold a sprint meeting there either, which concerned me somewhat, as it means I won’t be as in-the-loop about the progress of development which gives me a slight bit of unease. It also makes it more difficult to work as a designer when you don’t know how the other teams are progressing, as adjusting scope isn’t effectively possible when you don’t have a bearing on the pace of progress.
In hindsight, I probably should have mentioned this to him; as much as I tend to avoid speaking with him and the lack of understanding of Games he seems to present, I need to be better at swallowing my pride and bringing up issues to him when the Project Lead is otherwise unavailable. Doing so might have yielded a scrum meeting or even a general team update this week which would have given everyone on the team a better understanding of where we are and where we’re going in each discipline.
Reading Week- 14/02/2024 - 20/02/2024
Luckily, the Project Lead planned an audio call sprint meeting over reading week, slightly alleviating my worries about not being in the loop with development. However, the meeting was held at 10am and I had not gone to bed at a reasonable hour the night before, meaning I was incredibly drowsy and still waking up in the meeting, meaning I was not as attentive as I could have been.
Over reading Week, I continued to finish brushing up Character sheets and practising my writing skills, creating updated character sheets for my personal Novel project and researching Plot structure and pacing; all of which are skills of paramount importance for a good Narrative Designer.
This week, I was tasked with joining multiple audio calls with the two Design Leads to contribute towards writing a script for the tutorial level. The script would include dialogue from Jesse (The Hacker Character) training the AI Avatar in a safe environment before sending it into the family’s databases. The Character sheet I wrote for Jesse helped the other Designers get an idea of what kind of character he was and how he’d address the Avatar. However, there were a couple of elements from the Plot summary I had sent previously (mainly, Jesse not being the original creator of the AI model) had not been picked up by the others. In future, I will make sure to update other designers about any updates to the lore/plot more clearly and upfront, so as to avoid any confusion / misunderstanding later on. This effect snowballs the longer it is left unchecked, so I am relieved I had the opportunity to clear it up this week.
Week 5- 21/02/2024 - 27/02/2024
On the first day of Week 5, our Project Lead organised for an outside Voice Actor who is a first year student at ACM to record lines for the Tutorial level script me and the Design Leads had written the previous Week. At first, the Project Lead accompanied the Actor and the Audio engineer in charge of recording to direct, which struck me and the other Designers as odd, as we thought it would be more beneficial to have a Narrative Designer who worked on the character and script to direct instead. The Design Lead shared this concern so requested that I be able to accompany the recording process as a director. The Project Lead agreed and I went down to the recording room, and discovered that the Voice Actor was being directed to portray the character with a slightly posh/haughty voice (similar to the narrator from the Stanley Parable), which struck me as very odd, as the Character Sheet I had written for Jesse Grant (the character he was voicing) described him as a man from the North of England; brought up in a lower-middle class family who was affected negatively by Thatcherism (giving motivation for his fear of AI taking jobs). After the Project Lead exited the room, the Voice Actor expressed confusion over this, which led me to believe that the Project Lead likely hadn’t read the character sheet, as the haughty voice went completely against the Character's background.
I am glad I brought up this concern with the design lead, as if I hadn’t been sent down to direct, the character’s voice wouldn’t have reflected their heritage or upbringing at all. In AAA Development, passing issues up the chain of command like this is standard, people at lower levels of hierarchy passing it up to their ‘superiors’ and so on.
From here, I directed the voice actor to put on a slightly Northern accent. He had already nailed the character’s tone of voice, he had just been directed to use a counterintuitive accent; so it didn’t take long for us to get a couple of good takes.
Week 6- 28/02/2024 - 05/03/2024
On the Monday of this week, there were a large amount of absences; including the Producer, Team Lead and Primary Design Lead. This meant that we weren’t able to hold our scrum meeting, and none was organised following this. As a result, this week, me and multiple other people were confused about our sprint structure; our Scrum meetings have been inconsistently organised on a fortnightly basis, with our meeting this week being skipped due to neither the producer nor team lead being present.
Me and a few others in the team had a lot of confusion working out which sprint we are currently on.
This week, I was assigned to make a basic build of the first level in Unity using ProBuilder, which is a tool I haven’t used before. My first experience using probuilder made me wish I was using Unreal’s Geometry tools; but I soldiered through and did my best to make it look presentable.
My weakness in Unity has somewhat limited what I can do in this project, and was coming to light with my incompetence using ProBuilder (as I am more used to Unreal Engine and its Geometry tools). Unity is not typically a AAA standard Game Engine: it is more likely that I would use an engine such as Unreal or an in-house engine if I were to be in a AAA environment, so learning Unity would not be a high priority were I to pursue a AAA job.
Week 7- 06/03/2024 - 12/03/2024
I wasn’t tasked with much this week; I created a prefab from the level 1 I had built in probuilder, exported it, and sent it to one of the Design leads to have it polished. For the remainder of this week, my only task was to create a Narrative Document containing everything thus far which could be pasted into the GDD. Naturally, this didn’t take me long, so I used a lot of the extra time this week to do more research on writing and practise my prose with a novel idea I have been developing. I am gradually working on building my skills as a writer, so I took my extra time this week to devote more time to this as well as my 508 Project.
Week 8- 13/03/2024 - 19/03/2024
Unfortunately I was ill on the Wednesday of this week so I was unable to come in for the Scrum meeting. Luckily I was updated by members of the team through notes that were taken during the meeting so I was able to stay in the loop about how development is going.
There wasn’t much for me to do this week until the Dialogue Trigger prefab had been created by one of the Programmers, so I made myself busy while waiting by working more on my Novel and dedicating more time to my 508 Project.
In hindsight, I could've used the time this week and the previous week to flesh out aspects of Circuit Breaker's Narrative and backstory more, which would provide a much more solid foundation to build the game's plot off of, if it were hypothetically continued development for a longer period of time.
Week 9- 20/03/2024 - 26/03/2024
This week I was tasked with implementing the text from the script our Voice Actor had read previously into the project using the programmer’s dialogue trigger system. I had a brief call with the lead Programmer to walk me through its functionality.
The Dialogue trigger is a prefab which consists of two boxes; one to trigger the text and one to halt the player’s movement beyond it as a physical barrier.
I was provided a template in which you input the name of the speaker and add array elements for each paragraph of dialogue to appear on the dialogue box UI. Each instance of the Dialogue trigger prefab requires a reference to be inputted of the corresponding Dialogue text asset, the Dialogue controller, and the Dialogue UI Canvas.
When I came to implement this, the Design branch of the Gihub had compiler errors which meant I could not test or even save my work. Upon switching to the Main branch, I found that changes had been made to the dialogue system which caused the Dialogue Trigger Prefab to not recognise the Canvas or DialogueController references that are required, which meant that I could not implement the dialogue until these issues were fixed.
Week 10- 27/03/2024 - 02/04/2024
When the issues with the Dialogue Trigger Prefab had been fixed, yet another issue arose. I managed to figure out that the Canvas had been disabled in the hierarchy. This was a problem as the Dialogue box was under this in the hierarchy, and the text under that. The Dialogue Trigger Enabled the Dialogue Box, so it did nothing since the Canvas which it was under in the hierarchy was disabled.
After I fixed this issue, I managed to get the Dialogue implemented. However, this is not where my problems with the Dialogue system provided ended. If another Trigger was entered while Dialogue was being written, it would disable the second trigger without ever playing its dialogue. Considering this is a fast paced game, and the simple nature of the mechanics being taught will likely mean players will want to run through the tutorial, this will likely lead to a LOT of dialogue being missed
I think the design of the tutorial itself is very flawed, it feels quite hand-holdy for the simplicity of the mechanics it is teaching, and the dialogue present will mean players will have to wait around if they want to listen to it which runs counter to the appeal of a Parkour Platformer Game.
I think a suitable tutorial would be a simple level with lots of checkpoints, with prompts appearing on screen to display controls that wouldn’t be immediately obvious (for example, WASD to walk might be a bit unnecessary) so the player can learn the mechanics at a pace which complements the Game’s genre and gameplay far better.
Final Weeks and Conclusions
There wasn't a lot to do in terms of Narrative Design in the final few Weeks of Development, and being inexperienced in Unity, I couldn't help out Development in many other ways. However, this gave me far more time to work on my 508 Project which is in Unreal Engine, and to get that up to a decent standard.
In AAA development, I would be far more likely to use the Unreal Engine than Unity- if not them then probably a Studio's inhouse Engine. If I wanted to pursue a Career in AAA Gaming, it likely would be less important for me to get to grips with Unity than improving my skills in Unreal Engine. If anything, I should probably at least dedicate some time in the future to learning C#, as right now I only know C++.
Alongside this, the amount of Scrum meetings plummeted even lower than before. Our previous fortnightly Scrum meetings were sparse enough as they were in my opinion. In AAA Development, Scrum meetings would be almost Daily, and our Goals would be m ore iterative to give us decent quality testing builds frequently throughout development- we didn't get any testing done until the later weeks of development in Circuit Breaker.
Having more Scrum meetings would of allowed every member of the Team to be more in the loop about our development progress; and making our development structure with Scrum more iterative would of allowed us to get valuable playtesting done more frequently and earlier.
The project being on Unity hindered me from helping with development to my fullest extent, which was frustrating; however, it would not be as important as reinforcing my Unreal Engine Skills if I were to pursue a AAA industry Career.
I think overall, I preferred working in an environment that simulated an Indie Environment (last term's project) than I did with the AAA project. I had the opportunity to experiment with new skills I hadn't had a chance to fully work with yet last term (primarily 3D modelling) . I think I am someone who works better in an environment with less rigid hierarchy and more room to express concerns and ideas.
While in the AAA industry, I would likely have little creative freedom, I lament that I probably should of spoken up about ideas and concerns more in this project, as it is just a simulation of a AAA environment. However, once chance I did get to take some creative control and speak up about something a higher up of mine got wrong, was with our voice actor; who the Project Lead had directed to do a voice completely counter to the character's backstory (she had asked them to do a haughty voice when the character sheet I had made said they were from Northern England and not upper class.)