Blog 2: Originality in 2023

To start, I’m excited to work on my group project, building an HTML 5 Tower Defense game, for my Capstone Project course. It has been a little less than a week since my team has chosen our roles for the project and I am now the code and engineer developer. I will be building the basics of the game, this includes tower objects, enemy objects, interactions between the objects, and many more. This is the role I wanted since I will be more hands on with the coding and obtain more knowledge in building things. What I will talk shortly about today is originality. More specifically drawing inspiration from other creations to make something unique of our own.

In a world where it seems everything has been solved, created, and there being an oversaturation of innovative ideas, creating something original seems hard to come by. This is what I think will be one of the most challenging parts in creating our tower defense game. However, it seems many things that are coined original today were greatly inspired by something in the past. What I noticed is that some of the aspects of an “original” product or design is the same exact thing as something before it, just with an extra layer of sophistication, creative touch, or sometimes less layers of sophistication for a minimalist approach.

A good example of this is fashion. You see all of these new shoes and designer clothing. They still perform the same function as they did hundreds of years ago, but people will pay the premium for these clothes because of the brand behind it and the distinct designs put on them. Although a controversial figure, I think Kanye West has come out with clothing ideas I personally believe are original in every sense of the word, to say the least. Also when you can think about the many music artists and bands whose playing styles mimic some older musicians. Even some of the music genres these artists and bands are categorized under are greatly similar to genres in the past, but maybe with faster tempos and tweaks to the production features. When it comes to something that’s minimalist, first thing I think of are the relatively new thin wallets. Instead of having a bulky wallet with two flaps and a lot of cargo space, now in the digitalized world you have wallets that are sleek and thin that also have a small clip to carry cash and slits to carry IDs and other cards. Another minimalist product I can think of is the bikini, cut the one-piece swimsuit in half and now you have a two-piece swimsuit.

Where I believe we can make our game original, are either in the top layers of design and graphics or a tweak of the gameplay. It could be a small change that makes the game feel unique. Our team has looked at many inspirations for our tower defense game, one of these inspirations is a tower defense game called Kingdom Rush. If you haven’t heard of it you can check it out on the iOS app store or Google Play Store. We are observing the many features the game has such as the cartoonish design, the warning messages of oncoming enemies, and etcetera. However, even with the ideas that we take from the various tower defense games out there, as said before there is still room to implement distinctively creative ideas. After thinking about this topic for some time, I ask myself whether anything is truly original. But in the modern definition of the word, creating something “original” seems to be more easily accomplishable than many people seem to think.