Unit 13 Final Evaluation 

 

The main thing that helped me come up with my idea is when I took part in the group project earlier this year. I had an idea for a collection game for ingredients for potions but sadly this idea wasn’t chosen, so I took It upon myself to develop it further for my final project. I feel like my intentions and standards where set to high once again I found that I had the same issue last year in the final project with my Space game. I think having the extra year within the engine definitely contributed a lot to how my project has come out in the end. For example, the main building has a sort of interior and I feel my original idea wasn’t carried through the whole project as towards the end I had ran out of time.  

 

When it came to research, I knew that I had to research the initial mechanic that I wanted to add and some other games that fall under this Dystopian genre. I feel like my research is spotty in places due to me either not knowing what to research or having some personal matters that weighed down my time. I feel like my primary research is what pushed me to make this game look the way it does the secondary research helped to confirm what I was making as the games that I looked at where in a similar colour and style. I think that the research that I had carried out shaped my project doing my dissertation earlier this year helped this a lot as it told me what the basic codes were within the Dystopian genre (add one more example) 

 

Within this project I have achieved lots of new skills that I can use in the future. In the future these would all help by making my work flow a lot more simpler with file organisation I found that my system was quite bad as I didn’t always have the right file on me as I used two computers when in college as I was being distracted on the first one and that had most of my files on it. But towards the end of the project when I moved machines, I found myself using my hard drive 100% more and had certain files in certain locations so I knew where they were, by using a filing system it helped make my work flow a lot smoother than what it was with out it.  With the resources available to me both at home and in college as my computer at home can run 3DS Max and Unreal Engine without any issues I found myself doing some extra work to further enhance the project for example I tested the inventory system at home and knew the basics to how it worked at home and then I would take that project file into college and make that inventory system in my main project, this helped me figure out what variables I would need to make this work. Something I have learnt in this project is that I know the basics of substance painter by doing this I have made a building that is scaled to size according to the height of the player. I feel my most valuable development is moving a lot smoother within unreal engine as I have learnt some of the key bindings to move quicker for example shift+2 puts you into landscape mode and shift+1 puts you back so you can move things around control+shift+; builds the lighting. These all helped me by making me move around the workspace less with the mouse. I think that my practical skills have helped me make a suitable product for my chosen genre as it just seems like the sort of thing that would be seen in a movie of this genre as I did my dissertation on codes and conventions of dystopian games.  

 

The ongoing reflection has helped me as I have always had a chance to look back on what I had just done whether it being a building creation or the mechanic that wouldn’t work. I think that my timescale was a little bit off due to me becoming ill and not being able to move much this made me at least 1 week behind schedule from the start. But I could have countered the setbacks by putting more time aside and done some extra work outside of the college workshop sessions. The reflection helped me analyse my performance as I had a chance to think about what I had done for example the inventory system that I couldn’t get to work I had a chance to think about why it wouldn’t work and same with the Substance learning curve I had time to think about the many times that it went wrong and would work.  

 

I think that the strengths of the outcome are a semi positive as 1 it looks like a dystopian cityscape with skyscrapers in the background and 2 it is bad as I took on too much once again which forced me to take another look at the proposal and change the scope of the project towards the end to make it fit what I could do. The areas for my final product would be that I need to scale down what I can do practical wise at It puts all my research to waste if the product is in a bad state at the end, I have learnt this over the last 2 years of this course. The changes to the proposal made my product seem lacking in places as it is just lots of buildings where you can’t do much with it just explore the surrounding alleyways. The product Is suitable for the intended audience as it is aimed at teenagers that play general games, so the control scheme is suitable for them and the aesthetics as at a stage where it gives off a mysterious and ominous feeling as it is dark and foggy.  

As you can see in this image above this is me playing about with the fog to give it that ominous feeling. 

 

The things that I would do differently when going ahead is make a list of things that I need to do to accomplish the outcome that I am wanting to have. When it comes to problem solving, I need to blog more about the issues that I am having and then explain how I will fix this issue. For moving on to my next destination I need to explain my processes more I.E., why I am doing what I am not just lightly dusting the surface with a reason.