Final Evaluation
Research
Creating a survey for things about my game helped me see what players liked and disliked in some games. This gave me a good idea of what players would like to see in my game and what would make my game successful. My level evaluations were particularly useful for me as it allowed me to look at some games that are in a similar genre to mine. I looked at three games levels and how they performed. Which was useful for me to see what was successful. Doing some art style research was also helpful to me as this is where I looked at some different types of pixel art styles. As I had already decided on the idea to do a pixel art style in my first presentation. It was good to sort out what style of pixel art to do before I just start doing assets.
One thing that didn’t go as well as I thought it would be was actually coming up with concepts for my game and character. I really wanted my concepts to be the best they possibly can be because this is what my entire game would be based on. I wanted it to be quite unique and interesting for players to enjoy. But with some extra time, I think I came up with some really good concepts like the entire game being set inside of a monster.
I think my research was really successful at helping me throughout my project. As I went back to refer to my research multiple times to help me. It also helped me to make sure that I had a good plan before just starting my game. This was important as I don’t think my project would have been nearly as good without my research. But at some points, I feel that I may have spent too much time on things like mindmaps and mood boards. I feel like I was a little optimistic in my research because I had lots of ideas I wanted to implement but I don’t think I had enough time to put it all in. So overall I’m really happy with my research section.
Design
Creating some level designs helped me at lots of points throughout my project because having a basic layout of levels I could refer back to was very useful. I found this helpful for when I had to create my level and put the enemies into them. I’m really happy with my asset designs and how they turned out in my game. I wanted a simple UI design for my game as I thought that players would get too easily confused with more complex UI. I also don’t think a complex UI fits the theme of my game so it wouldn’t make sense to have one. I then created some game flow charts and a beat chart for use in my game later. This was especially useful for when I had to create my menus and it helped with pacing my game correctly. This is key as I don’t want my game to be too short so this is a good way for me to see how long I expect it to be.
The only thing I would have liked to improve would be the sound design of my game. I left the sound design to the last minute which meant that I didn’t have enough time to add in some sound effects. But I did manage to quickly make some quite unique music for each of my levels and my menus. I am still really happy with some of the 8-bit style music I made for my game in beep box. If I did have some more time I would have definitely added in some sound effects.
I would like to have added in some more enemies to make each of my levels more unique like I planned. But I did only manage to get in two of my unique enemies in my game which is quite unfortunate. I would have also liked to add in sound effects into my game but for time reasons I had to cut these things for my game.
Time-Management
I feel that being too optimistic at the start of the project really wasn’t good for my project overall. I wanted to get lots of different less important ideas into my game instead of focussing on making more important mechanics the best they can be. This meant that I had to cut things that were the least important to my game at that moment such as cut scenes, extra enemies and more abilities for the player. I cut these things as I thought they would have the least impact on the gameplay of the game but would take the most amount of time for me to complete.
Overall I think my biggest problems came from my time-management as I think I prioritised some elements of my game that weren’t as important as others. Like I spent a lot of time making animations and perfecting them when I could have just prioritised other parts of my main mechanics. But I did still get most of the stuff that I wanted to get in the game so my time management wasn’t too bad. If I were to do this project again I would have planned my time out better at the start of the project. I would have also used Trello to set deadlines for myself more. As I did this a couple of times but I feel if I would have done this more it would have helped me to stay on time especially towards the end of my project.
Art
Creating my character was really important to my game as this is what the player will use throughout the game. But I took some extra time on this and made a character that I’m really happy with. So I was really happy with my character designs as I thought it fit really well with the backstory I came up with in my research. I then moved on to creating my ground assets its important to have a good looking ground and platform assets as that’s what a lot of players think is important about a game is its art. It is also important that all of my ground assets fit together as if they don’t it can look quite glitchy and buggy. I did have to make sure that all of my assets were correctly coloured as things like my platforms didn’t stand out against the background. My enemies were the next big thing I wanted to look good in the game as it is one of the main parts of my game. I wanted lots of unique enemies that would still keep with the theme of my game.
One thing that I had a couple of problems with was the animations for my character and enemies in my game. I had problems with this because I wanted to create a basic walking animation for each of my enemies and my player. I found that I couldn’t make the walking look natural. I also had a problem with lining up all my animations as when I put the animation in unity It would move side to side slightly. These were quite easy fixes but still took up some time.
I’m really happy with my assets and how they turned out in my game. As I said in my research I felt that the design of my characters and the style of my game is important to a game’s success. Even though I had a couple of problems with my art I still think it was a relatively easy section of my game.
Code
My player code was the main code of the game that I used for lots of different things to do with my player. This is where I handled most of the things that the player would damage or get damaged by. This was a really simple and easy way to to do this as it was only a couple of lines of code instead of lots of lines of codes in multiple codes. The coding my boss was very easy as all I did was modify some of my other codes from my enemies and I changed the values to get exactly what I wanted. This was a very basic solution but I would have liked to have my boss to have a little more depth but I only started my boss code at the end of my project. So I was a little rushed when it came to coding my boss. My other big code was my health code which for my player I had hearts that would update. I have done this before in a previous project so I knew exactly what I needed to do. So I was able to sort this code out quite easily.
One particular code that I had lots of problems with would be my knockback code for when the player got damaged. I found out very quickly that this was quite a difficult code to do but I still wanted to do it as I thought it would make my game look a lot better. But unfortunately when I tried to put it in it would fling my player up into the air randomly. So instead of spending lots of time on trying to get this to work, I made it so that the player would flash red and I just completely removed knockback.
Overall I think my codding in my game went really well even though I had quite a few problems I am really happy with the codes I have and how they work. I don’t think they were the most efficient codes I could have made as I just wanted to get my mechanics in the game. But if I did do another project with more time I definitely would have made them run a little more efficiently.
Project Summary
One of the big things I have learned from this project would be creating a better plan of what I should get done each week at the start of the project. This helped me keep up with my project a lot better and help me with my time management. I feel this was the biggest problem I had during my project. Also being too optimistic at the start of my project didn’t help with my time management as some of my main ideas didn’t get as much functionality put into the game as I would have liked. I did also learn a lot of practical skills like being able to properly animate characters and make them look good. In the past, I hadn’t really done many 2d animations so this was a first for me. I found that it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be the only challenge was making it look normal with the character I had created. But after I figured out a way to do it for one I just did it the same way as the others.
Overall I’m really happy with the state of my game and website as I got almost everything I wanted into them on time. My game works really well and just how I wanted it to work but I would always like to add more to it. I’m especially happy with the setting of my game and how my art really works with it. I’m also happy with a lot of the design work I have done as I feel it helped me at lots of different points throughout my project. So, for example, it was really useful for me to look back at some of the level designs I made to help me build up my levels. So overall I would say this project was quite successful although I had a lot of problems during my project I managed to overcome them.
Games Design 