#00 A Beginning: One Quest Design a Week

 Where to start? When to start? How to start? In a world where poststructuralism is a thing (they like to dissolve structures (Link)), these might seem like hard questions. If we cannot be sure of any structure, what does remain?

The answer is given by the poststructuralists themselves: Even if we can never again be sure of any structure, we nonetheless need and may use it. They only caviat is: Always reflect your usage and improve it, always keep in mind that you cannot represent reality perfectly this way.

With this mindset, I'm writing this beginning, which is an attempt in structuring a part of my thoughts and interactions with the world. With this mindset, I'm going to start a project that I call "One Quest Design a Week".

One Quest Design a Week

Inspired by a course at my university and the "Game a Week"-project by Adriel Wallick (Link), I got the idea of connecting my wish for theoretical and practical learning of quest design via a similar project. These are the parts of Adriel's concept that particularly resonated with me:

• you get to actually design things instead of always thinking of it
• a great quantity of ideas and practices is tested
• public documentation (you are here)
  
• regular feedback and input from other people
  

While my project will indeed be similar to Adriel's, there are some noteable differences:

• I am doing quest, not game design
• as you will see, I'm allowing myself to work on the same quest designs in multiple weeks to allow some ideas to "grow"
• my input will very explicitly contain some (more or less) theoretical readings

  So this is what I'm aiming for: For one year, every week a quest design concept and implementation, which is possibly based on an earlier work. Each week, an update will appear here, where I shortly reflect my input (theoretical readings and previous feedback) and the resulting design artifacts.

Structuring a Design Process

Besides finding first words I also tasked myself with finding an appropriate design process structure for this beginning. Part of this can already be seen above, where I set the overall time plan. Here, I'm presenting my plan for a concrete week.

There is a set of guidelines stemming from work psychology of which I've grown quite fond. The SMART acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. If we set goals with these properties, then the chance of achieving them is demmed to be higher. The whole project is designed with that in mind, and thus the concrete steps per week will be too.

There are numerous frameworks and ideas out there which offer structures for all kind of work processes, often written up by people of the practice. Here are some examples close to quest design:

• General Design: Diamond Model and Human Centered Design (Don Norman) 
• Software Engineering: Extreme Programming, Scrum, V-Model 
• Game, Level Design: The Art of Game Design (Link), An Architectural Approach to Level Design (Link) 
• Narrative, Quest Design: The Narrative Design Toolbox (Link), Interview with CD Project RED Quest Designers (Link)
  

As we travel down this list, the field becomes more and more narrow, newer, and informations on the specific field rarer. To avoid overthinking things, I will do the following five steps per week for now (loosely inspired by the above sources):

1. read previous feedback and choose theoretical input 
2. generate ideas (in form of onliners) 
3. choose idea and develop it coarsely 
4. prototype idea and plan needed assets
   
5. evaluate doings in blog post and request feedback

I intend to do steps one and two over the course of the week. On step three and four I want to spend 4h a week, on step five 1h. All in all there shouldn't be a hard restriction on this linearity - if design literature agrees on one point, it is probably the concept of iteration.

In order to evaluate my doings, reflection is valuable. Nonetheless, feedback from outside would be much better, which is why I'll try to gather people who will give me their opinions (you can be one of them!). In each blog post a few short questions will be suggested.

My feedback questions will probably often resolve around the concept with its ludition (player/game goals/actions) and narration (worldbuilding/characters/story), the overall relation of quests to other game elements, practical issues and my quest design process.

Ideas for Feedback

Here follows my first set of questions, which you might use as inspiration:

• What comes to your mind when reading the ideas in this blog post?
• What might be interesting (scientific) sources for narrative/quest design?
• How could the project structure be improved?

You can write me in the comments, via my E-Mail address (gregor.soennichsen@gmail.com) or wherever else you find me (rule of thumb: if it contains feedback, I'll do almost everything to get it).

Something Ends, Something Begins

As a conclusion, some final thoughts.

By starting this project right now, I'm setting an end to some things that came before - in particular to the (widespread) phenomenon of wanting to do something, but not doing it (some call this procrastination). This beginning has thus not only study-related consequences, but also personal ones: It is a movement away from a passive, comfortable, waiting position towards a more unknown, unchartered territory. Bilbo Baggins would call it an adventure.

In that spirit: Merry Christmas and see you next time!