Task 7 – Evaluation
- 1. TASK 7 – EVALUATION Callum Deighton
- 2. Technical Quality • For our game's technical quality we wanted to perfect the pixel style used in many indie style games today so we all looked closely into the art styles and how we could incorporate this art style into our game and make it very aesthetically pleasing. For the gameplay individually I think we all did a good job of making our game look good with its own unique style and also because we all made different genres so it let us show our individual work very creatively.
- 3. Technical Quality The gameplay itself was very straightforward even with our games all put together as it starts with the hero leaving his house, travelling through a forest, entering through a haunted cave and defeating a goblin which holds his captured sister. While this is good for the player as it is pretty linear and doesn't confuse them, it wasn't our original plan, as many of our original ideas including a final boss battle was planned for the game but had to get cut for time restraints.
- 4. Technical Quality Our sound design was pretty much a failure, we recorded multiple sounds and music to use for the game however we couldn't afford enough time to edit and tweak them to fit our game, so all the sounds remain unused. The entirety of the game was made inside GameMaker Studio, where I made all the sprites, scripts and other components for the game, the process for making said components wasn't too tough, as there is a built in instruction guide for the scripts and components which helped greatly. I also used CamStudio 2.7 to record my footage, which I then uploaded to YouTube to use on my blog, finally although not included I did use some recording software to do some Foley artistry for our sounds as well as the program REAPER where I began editing the sounds.
- 5. Production Skills Throughout this FMP I have managed to acquire many new skills to use in the future. Some skills I learnt have included new art styles to use for my game including various environment and character designs which also include making various animations for the backgrounds and characters. Another skill I have learnt is because we worked with many different genres as per the focus of our project we managed to learn how all these different genres are made and how they vary in gameplay and programming.
- 6. Production Skills I have also been able to improve some of my skills such as creating sprites as like I said before, I learnt many new artistic styles which will prove very handy in the future. I also managed to improve in making scripts as although I was not that good at making them beforehand, with a combination of looking at the instruction guide and help off my other group mates, I have improved vastly in making the scripts for games. Adobe Photoshop was also used to add effects to some of my sprites to make it look more visually appealing, I am already very experienced in Photoshop so I had no problems whilst doing this. Finally I also improved a lot in editing sounds as for the sounds I managed to edit I managed to experiment and use some new audio techniques which include using and messing with Reverb as well as the various wet/dry effects of the sounds.
- 7. Original Intentions • Our final product actually is very different from our original design, whilst some of the initial ideas were kept, everything else had changed. One such idea we had in concept was that we originally had the protagonist have a hub world where he would complete the various objectives in each world (which was a different genre each) and after defeating each he would then be able to access the giant door which would hold the final boss, however all of this concept had to go apart from the multiple genre concept and the game changed to being one straight-through story which went through multiple genres throughout. Another thing that changed were the multiple enemies that we had planned to put into the game, when it came to actually making the game we found that most of the enemy designs wouldn't fit with the game so they got removed. Another major thing that changed was I started my part of the game as a fighting game, however after I finished designing my characters I ran into multiple issues in creating my fighting game, and because of the time constraints I had to change my game from a fighting game into a button mashing game in which the player has to press a certain button a certain amount of times before the time runs out.
- 8. Original Intentions The parts we did keep however was primarily the multiple genre concept but we also kept some of the enemy concepts as well as the main story which we showed via multiple text screens throughout the game.
- 9. Time Management Overall I believe the time management could've been handled a lot better throughout the project. As we were making the game some of the people in our group were unsure of what they wanted to create for the game and so it took them a long time before any actual progress was made for said people, although in the end some form of work that we could use was made so it wasn't a complete loss. For the people such as myself who managed to fully complete our level, we feel like we had enough time to create something substantial and good for our final product. When it came to problem solving we we're very good at sorting any problems we came across, most of the errors that we came across would get sorted within minutes, plus some of us were better in other fields than other such as artwork, programming, scripting etc so if we ever ran into a problem involving one of these subjects we could rely on each other for help. Beginning Project Schedule End Project Schedule
- 10. Project Audience Because our game had multiple genres involved in it, there was a wide target audience we had for our game and I believe they would enjoy our game because I think each genre we made enjoyable for them to play and also possibly gives them a chance to try out new video game genres, possibly for the first time ever. Judging from the feedback we got I believe people really enjoyed the various artwork we incorporated into our game which is good because one of our main goals was to make it look as aesthetically pleasing as possible. Overall most of the feedback was good which is a big positive for us, we did get some negatives however, mainly that some of the levels and instructions weren't very clear which made it tough to play some of the games.
- 11. Summary • If I was to tackle this project again one thing I would make sure of is to know what we could realistically achieve in the time frame we have, as we had to cut many ideas to get the game out in time. Also I would have all the game have a similar playstyle as all the various gameplay styles seemed to confuse people and that making all these different engines did cost us quite a bit of time whereas everyone using the same engine would've allowed us to achieve a lot more. The final thing I would do differently would be to put a lot more emphasis on the story, as the bits of story we did have wasn't that well made and we originally wanted to use cutscenes which would have been a lot more effective but again was cut due to time constraints. •