Evaluation

FMP Final Evaluation

For our Final Major Project, we had to produce our ideas in a personal project with our own skillsets with the theme of Location. First, I had taken a look at my course review to determine my pathway in my Final Major Project. At the time, I was not confident in my skills, therefore my scoring for my own skills were very low. With this in mind, I carefully chose a pathway that I would be comfortable and interested with. My project was either going to be a games production or animation. I chose this because these are the subjects in my course that I thoroughly enjoyed. Later on in my project I decided that my production would be based on games, this is a result of previous experiences and the fact that I feel more confident with this form of media. 

To meet my vision, I used the game making application Construct 3, the reason for this is due to learning how to effectively code using construct and rely that it would be the best way to bring my ideas to life without coming across to many difficulties. My aims for this project was to create a top-down role playing game with coding that I have never tried before in using Construct. Personally, I wanted to develop on more soft skills like communication, organising work, adapting to difficult situations and time management that I have used over the year. I was more confident in my decision making and problem solving skills. The soft skill that I feel is the least important is communication because it is a personal project and the only people that I thought I would communicate with is my teacher and other people who could help with me in video game music.

I wanted to produce a game with features and techniques that I've never tried to place in my past games before. This is also different as my first two previous games that I have made in other projects as they were platformer games, not RPG. I had 2 main aims for myself in this project and it was to develop my understanding of using Construct 3 and to have a finished and completed game that people can play and see an ending. This is because my previous projects have been unfinished, so my main aim is to have a completed project that doesn't look experimental. 

Looking back at my reflective journal, I noticed that I have a few weeks left out explaining my process.Therefore, I did not use my time well on my project and my blogger. First when I started to develop my game, I was far behind my proposed schedule by 2 weeks and in those 2 weeks I was supposed to have already finished character designs/sprites. Therefore, when I started on the game I started with creating character designs for around a week and a half. Then I decided that I would not be able to design my own detailed sprites with the amount of time that I had left with the project. This was every important as this helped me to save time and finish the game with the features that I aimed for. Next time, I will use my project time wisely and efficiently.

My original concept had many ideas and challenges for myself which included a story plot because one of the main features in my game is a functioning textbox. The finished game had only three levels when my first idea had more levels like five or six. There weren't many developments apart from me changing  the game to be more mechanics based because I didn't have enough time left to make every aspect in my game to look very detailed. Instead I had to make sure all of my features went in the game first otherwise my game wouldn't even be a game anymore.Therefore, I used my research about how other games show a location in a game and the most influential point I took from it was how colours can represent a lot of things in a location. The colours in the game were very important as it was the only part of my game that related with location.

There were some very challenging moments whilst using construct 3 even though I used tutorials by 'Game Design with Reily' and 'DeltaStarStudio' on Youtube. This was because my game wasn't as similar to theirs, so I had to also make changes to my layouts and its properties in construct. The most challenging piece of coding was the textboxes in a game, which gave the game more life. The tutorial I learned from, DeltaStarStudio, had a fully functioning game whilst I only had one layout with an event sheet. To overcome this, I had to create more than one layer and layout which was very new to me since I never did this in my practice and previous project. When I had finished following the tutorial, I tested to see if the textboxes appear on command. At first, it did not work as the textbox did not show the intended script, so I used the debug layout feature which allows me to see all the properties in the game whilst playing the actual game itself. After finding out what was wrong with the gameplay by retracing my steps, which is what I did for all of my problems in the game, I changed the coding to make the game work. 

The next part of my game is learning how to create another level that the player can go to. Before that, I had learnt to create a simple title screen for the game which introduces my audience what to do in the game. With the coding I had learnt on the title screen, I was able to create the next level and make the player successfully transport to the level. After this, all the tutorials that I had learnt had made me able to understand how construct works and how to make all the coding myself without any guidance. Also my organisation of my game with all layouts (where the game visual is designed) and event sheets (where the game's coding is produced) was more arranged. This has made my work more accessible to edit and made me work more effectively. On the other hand, my soft skills development wasn't as great as my practical skills development. One soft skill I had developed was decisiveness by prioritising my game features over the sprite design. However, the other soft skill I did not exceed was time management because I was behind in my work a lot at the beginning of the project. 

I am very happy with the outcome of my project because this is the first game project that is fully and functioning and completed. The parts of my game that I'm proud of are the interactable characters that can speak to you and give advice on how to play the game. I also added a sword feature to defeat enemies, however it isn't visually appealing and doesn't look like a sword at first and it looks like a line. In addition to the sword, I added an enemy ai that will chase you and cause damage once they see you. However, at the end of the level I created a Boss that had the same properties but wouldn't chase you around. I wanted to create the final level a level where there would be surprises that the player hasn't experienced before in the previous levels. Since I didn't want to make all the levels the same, I made all 3 of them different than each other. The player has a simple 4-directional walking function that had a walking animation that I created, even though it glitches on the wall occasionally. The colours I personally selected for the game's location are what I believe represent the location that I intended. It could be confusing to the people that test my game. Some extra features that I added to make this a official game were; a health bar, a score counter, exits for the levels and different finishing screens. The game's visuals aren't the best an detailed as the background are simple colours and blocks, which is something I want to improve on next time by improving my soft skills.

With my game completed, I allowed my classmates to play it, so I can gain feedback on what they think of my game and what I need to improve on. A positive comment about my improvement and skills was 'a great way of showing your skills and personal knowledge that you have learned over the media course'. I agreed with this statement as I wanted to show that I have improved on my game making skills. Another positive comment is about the game which was 'the game had many features that made the experience enjoyable'. A negative comment was 'the game had some areas that needed some fixing like the enemy clipping through the walls'. I agreed with this comment because I know there are parts of my game where it would not run smoothly. 

My most influential part I will take away from my project/game and use it next time in another personal project is my prioritising with the parts of a project that will have to be in the final product. Practical skills that I will need to improve are character designs which is evident in when I took a long time on one character and my creative thinking process took too long as well. My soft skills that I will need to improve is time managing my project which is evident in when I did not use all of my project time wisely and effectively at the beginning of the project.