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Cover Art
Evaluation
This unit has been the biggest endeavour that I've worked on throughout the two years here, going through a lot of development in many different ways.
Initial Response
Initial Response
The task given was to create a piece of media, mainly a game or animation. Unlike last year, we got the liberty to decide on whatever theme and topic we wanted to focus on, the only necessity is that it had to suite the success criteria for the unit as a whole. Upon learning about this, I was very intrigued and fascinated by what I could do with this freedom, as the lack of constraints creates an unlimited potential of what the outcome could be. However, I was also quite nervous and lost, as the extra freedom makes for many ideas to be possible, making it hard to choose what's the best idea to go for. I had some form of writer's block at the start, not fully able to generate an idea that I was comfortable with. This issue persisted until I started to play some games to gain some ideas and take elements from them, one of which was called Ecco the Dolphin. That game really assisted in my thought process and gave me the idea for my chosen topic. At this point, all I knew is that I wanted to make a game involving an environment a person and explore and absorb.
After a while, I was able to further define the theme and decided to go for the area of ecosystems. This breed multiple ideas for the outcome, going from playing a fish in a fish tank to playing as abstract creates in space. I was able to come to a proper conclusion from all the different forms of research I did, none necessarily changed my concept, but they did give me different things to draw from to from my last idea. The primary research that I did for Spyro The Dragon in the form of Player Acting, really showed me how an open and vibrant environment with things connecting together can really bring a world to life and make it a joy to simply traverse around. This is what furthered my desire to have an explorative game. Then I continued to do some primary research from Contextual Analisis to Artistic Experimentation. Both of which is what inspired me to combine a realistic and unrealistic approach in the form of having creatures as hybrids of real-life creatures. In the end, I aimed to make a game of an underwater world filled with hybrids and a community of creatures in a seamlessly connected world for the player to explore and absorb the ambience.
I went through the general processes for game design. I began with my development period where I played games to help with my thought process and conducted secondary and primary research. Midway through this was when we were prohibited from going to college due to the new virus, Covid-19 spreading around. In the beginning, this did not affect me at all and working from home even helped me as I could work everything at my own pace. Soon after that announcement from the college. I managed to put all my ideas together as I made my Pecha Kucha and allowed others to give it feedback. At this point, I was going to begin my Pre-Production stage and aimed to complete the stage by the end of easter. Unfortunately, as described on my blog, my wellbeing was very challenged for a while at that point. It started with shortness of breath to flat out having anxiety attacks. This persisted for multiple weeks and was most likely down to anxiety I was developing by possibly being more afraid of what my condition could have been. This really affected my ability to do any work as any time I tried, there would always be an issue to come up and this all brought my mood down. Eventually, I started to get better, but with the many weeks of not doing work, and with the gloomy time it was with still being in lockdown, my schedule was completely shot and I started to lack any motivation to anything especially since I was late into the project and hadn't even compleated Pre-Production yet. This was pretty much the only major issue I suffered through this whole project and it ended up very detrimental. I attempted to overcome the issue while it was going on by trying to do the minimum of work I could and plan it for separate days and give myself breaks. But as I said before, my motivation was very down as I became quite depressed at that point of time so I wasn't successful in that department.
After a few more weeks, I started to feel much better and was able to retrieve most of my motivation back by going into college ( as I was granted permission to) to get back into my Profesional working mindset. Eventually, I felt like I didn't need to go there anymore and was able to work from home just fine. I finally began Pre-Production and got some designs done for creatures that I liked and was thrilled to eventually bring them into my games world. Unfortunately, I discovered that the deadline for everything was coming very soon which was a surprise as, with everything that was happening, it was difficult to keep track of time. I knew I was never going to be able to complete all of my concept art along with making the structure of my game so I made the executive decision to scrap Pre-Production and focus on making a demo of what my game would be so I would have at least something to show in place of it rather than nothing. Doing this proved somewhat successful, I managed to create some of the basic features of my game in little time and under the pressure of the deadline.
Making this short demo allowed me to de-rust my skills with Unity and even developed it further. I now know the basics of constructing different menus when making a game in it, shown by how I was able to create a main menu that even had a transition effect when booting up the game that I had full control over. My skills were further displayed on how I managed to make a pause menu without following a tutorial and basing it on my own logic and knowledge of the code. Aspects like this really showed how far I've come with my coding and has given me a lot of hope for myself in the future. What I'm most happy about this object, is that it gave me the opportunity to get a tour around King Studios, getting to actually being in the professional world I aim to be a part of. This visit also helped me with my organisational skills, displayed with my now much better planning process. Now I use task managers to organise my tasks and I've become more objective in my decision making, such as knowing when to leave something out for the ska e of the project. All of these things are what prevented the project from being a complete failure.
Overall, I would call only game itself a failure/unsuccessful. I only just managed to make a sort of demo that doesn't even have a fraction of what I wanted to have. I would like to say that if I were to relive it, I would try harder to work through the sick period I had. However, remembering how I felt then, it properly still wouldn't be something I could work through as is wasn't even down do being sick as it was mostly down to anxiety. As disappointing as it was, it wasn't something in my control so I don't hold this too much on myself. One thing I believe I make take from that for the future, is First, to make Worst-Case Scenario plans, which can be planning on what I would do if anything detriments my ability to work, and Second, to begin putting any assets on Unity (or any other game engine) much earlier as this will allow a developing base ot always exist rather than nothing before I get to Production. In terms of the project as a whole, I believe its far from a failure, as I still managed to develop my coding skills, organisation with production, become more independent with everything die to have to do everything during lockdown and even got to learn more about the professional world of game design.
Idea Development/Influence
Shortcoming
After a few more weeks, I started to feel much better and was able to retrieve most of my motivation back by going into college ( as I was granted permission to) to get back into my Profesional working mindset. Eventually, I felt like I didn't need to go there anymore and was able to work from home just fine. I finally began Pre-Production and got some designs done for creatures that I liked and was thrilled to eventually bring them into my games world. Unfortunately, I discovered that the deadline for everything was coming very soon which was a surprise as, with everything that was happening, it was difficult to keep track of time. I knew I was never going to be able to complete all of my concept art along with making the structure of my game so I made the executive decision to scrap Pre-Production and focus on making a demo of what my game would be so I would have at least something to show in place of it rather than nothing. Doing this proved somewhat successful, I managed to create some of the basic features of my game in little time and under the pressure of the deadline.
Overcoming/Skills Development
Making this short demo allowed me to de-rust my skills with Unity and even developed it further. I now know the basics of constructing different menus when making a game in it, shown by how I was able to create a main menu that even had a transition effect when booting up the game that I had full control over. My skills were further displayed on how I managed to make a pause menu without following a tutorial and basing it on my own logic and knowledge of the code. Aspects like this really showed how far I've come with my coding and has given me a lot of hope for myself in the future. What I'm most happy about this object, is that it gave me the opportunity to get a tour around King Studios, getting to actually being in the professional world I aim to be a part of. This visit also helped me with my organisational skills, displayed with my now much better planning process. Now I use task managers to organise my tasks and I've become more objective in my decision making, such as knowing when to leave something out for the ska e of the project. All of these things are what prevented the project from being a complete failure.
Overview
Overall, I would call only game itself a failure/unsuccessful. I only just managed to make a sort of demo that doesn't even have a fraction of what I wanted to have. I would like to say that if I were to relive it, I would try harder to work through the sick period I had. However, remembering how I felt then, it properly still wouldn't be something I could work through as is wasn't even down do being sick as it was mostly down to anxiety. As disappointing as it was, it wasn't something in my control so I don't hold this too much on myself. One thing I believe I make take from that for the future, is First, to make Worst-Case Scenario plans, which can be planning on what I would do if anything detriments my ability to work, and Second, to begin putting any assets on Unity (or any other game engine) much earlier as this will allow a developing base ot always exist rather than nothing before I get to Production. In terms of the project as a whole, I believe its far from a failure, as I still managed to develop my coding skills, organisation with production, become more independent with everything die to have to do everything during lockdown and even got to learn more about the professional world of game design.
And that has been my Unit 13
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