Building Alliances Week 2

Scheduling

For the progression of my project, I have come up with a rough schedule of what I want to be doing and when, in order to keep up to date with my work without risk of falling behind. In order to do this, I have made a weekly breakdown of what I will be doing for each day.

With the first 7 weeks of the project schduled, I will start to work through everything as I have it layout on here. At the end of week 7, I will make another schedule based on how well I kept to this timetable, this will allow me to more accurately gague how much work I can get done per week for the second timetable, as I don't want to end up setting myself unrealistic targets, or not setting myself enough work to do, as this will either make me stressed, or I will fall behind due to a lack of completed work.

Research part 1

For the majority of the next few weeks, as a group we will be researching different areas in order to inform all of the choices for the later stages of development for our game. As the lead researcher, it is my responsibility to allocate different research areas to everyone and also check up on what research they have done and help them with thinking of different areas to research if they finish with one part. We also decided that we'll start having weekly meetings outside of uni so we can discuss collective matters and also allocate jobs to one another more easily, rather than running the risk of people missing messages.

In this week's out of session meeting, I allocated the first set of research topics for everyone to look into. The research topics were; where micro plastics come from, the effects micro plastics have on the human body when ingested, ways micro plastics can be combatted/ prevented and finally, different types of microplastics. I feel like this research topics are very important to look into for the game since we're meant to make it educational about the dangers of microplastics. 

For my research this week on micro plastics, I will be looking into where they come from and how they enter the human body, whether it's from ingestion, or if they have other ways of entering the human body. 

Where do micro plastics come from, and how do they enter the human body?

According to the National Ocean Service, mirco plastics can come from a variety of different places, such as "larger pieces of plastic that have been broken down into smaller pieces, resin pellets used for plastic manufacturing, or in the form of microbeads, which are small, manufactured plastic beads used in health and beauty products" (National Ocean Service, 2024). Taking these sources into mind, it becomes very easy from there to figure out how micro plastics are able to make it into the human body so easily as a huge portion of these microplastics make it into water as is stated later in the same article "A lot of it ends up in the ocean. Most plastics in the ocean break down into small particles" (National Ocean Service, 2024). As a lot of micro plastics make it into the ocean, this means a large portion of the ocean's inhabitants will end up ingesting the micro plastics, in turn meaning fish that we eat will most likely contain microplastics, which then end up in our bodies. 

Another study shows that microplastics are not just found in fish from the ocean. According to Norwegian researchers "Researchers in Norway have found mircosplastics in the gills and cells from farmed Salmon" (Fishfarmingexpert, 2019) 

Having research areas away from seafood and fish farming, I found even more ways microplastics are making it into the food and drinks that we eat. In an article on the World Economic Forum, it is stated that "Micro plastics have been found in land, sea and air, across the foodchain and throughout the human body" (World Economic Forum, 2024) 

Overall, what I have learnt from my research this week is, it's very hard to avoid microplastics, even if you're being careful, they have made it into all sides of the foodchain meaning pretty much everything we eat and drink is us ingesting microplastics. While each thing we eat proportionally might not have that much in the way of microplastic content, over an entire year, the number can build up to as much as 211,000 microplastic particles (World Economics Forum, 2024), potentially more depending on where you live. From those numbers alone, it's very easy to see how this could end up being a colossal health problem for every human in the coming years.

Visual research

Before I start my initial idea generation process, I will be looking into different design methods that I can use in order to come up with my idea, what sorts of themes I can include with my design process following the ideas that I have come up with alongside my team and how they can be incorporated intot he environment.
One of the main things we discussed as a group was how we're going to structure the levels, how the enemies will traverse the environment, and how this can be shown in the eventual final scene. One of the best ideas that we cam up with was the idea of having the levels based on the cutout/ cross section of the human body, like what you'd see in a biology text book. The image above is a great example of what we were talking about.
The main idea that I liked for the way the enemies will traverse the level is along the top face of the level, while the walls around the sides will be covered in details inspired by biological diagrams. We did also mention potentially having multi layer levels, where the enemies drop down at some point, and continue travelling along a different level, although we're not entirely sure how this would look visually in game, as covering multiple areas at the same time could become a tedious process to show off. 

For the main part of the project, I have been tasked with creating the level and environment designs, this will mean I will need to find more sources of inspiration for my designs, including multiple different organ diagrams for different levels.

For inspiration, I had a look at different diagrams of different organs and combined organ diagrams, this also included 2d diagrams and cross sections as this will provide more inspiration that just looking at 3d diagrams and cutouts, as these diagrams will show the same areas differently. One thing that is very constant among the diagrams I have looked at is the bright pink of the surfaces. While this is not their natural colour, I could use this as inspiration for when I get to the stage of deciding on my colourschemes, as we have decided as a group, we want our game to be accessible for a young teen audience onwards, so scenes of realistic gore don't really apply to what our aims are, so we will be using brighter, less accurate colorus throughout our designs. 

Having now completed my initial research for the general visual style of the game, I will now start to sketch some initial level and environment ideas, looking at different organs as the inspiration, and how they can be applied to a cutout style environment that'd still work as a tower defence game.

References

NOAA, 2024. What are microplastics?[online]. oceanservice.noaa.gov: NOAA. Available at: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/microplastics.html#:~:text=Microplastics%20can%20come%20from%20a,in%20health%20and%20beauty%20products. Accessed [06/10/2024] 1a

NOAA, 2024. What are microplastics?[online]. oceanservice.noaa.gov: NOAA. Available at: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/microplastics.html#:~:text=Microplastics%20can%20come%20from%20a,in%20health%20and%20beauty%20products. Accessed [06/10/2024] 1b

Gareth Moore, 2019. Study: Micro plastic captured in salmon gills and cells [online] Fishfarmingexpert: Ocean Space Media AS. Available at: https://www.fishfarmingexpert.com/gills-macrophages-microplastic/study-microplastic-captured-in-salmon-gills-and-cells/1377394#:~:text=Researchers%20in%20Norway%20have%20found,by%20the%20body's%20cleansing%20cells. Accessed [06/10/2024]

Joe Myers, 2024. Microplastics: Are we facing a new health crisis - and what can be done about it? [online] World Economic Forum: World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/09/how-microplastics-get-into-the-food-chain/#:~:text=Microplastics%20have%20been%20found%20in%20foodstuffs%20including%20honey%2C%20tea%20and,to%20a%20Cardiff%20University%20study. Accessed [06/10/2024] 2a

Joe Myers, 2024. Microplastics: Are we facing a new health crisis - and what can be done about it? [online] World Economic Forum: World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/09/how-microplastics-get-into-the-food-chain/#:~:text=Microplastics%20have%20been%20found%20in%20foodstuffs%20including%20honey%2C%20tea%20and,to%20a%20Cardiff%20University%20study. Accessed [06/10/2024] 2b

Douglas Wilkin and Niamh Grey-Wilson, 2025. 17.3 Human organs and Organ Systems - Advanced [online] The CK-12 Editorial Team: CK-12. Available at: https://flexbooks.ck12.org/cbook/ck-12-advanced-biology/section/17.3/primary/lesson/human-organs-and-organ-systems-advanced-bio-adv/ Accessed [24/01/2025]

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