Project Evaluation​

​

During my final week, I've been putting some finishing touches to my game and finishing up my website. I feel I could continue to build the game and add further detail and functionality but have run out of time. Overall I'm pleased with how it turned out. I've found the website part of the project very challenging to try and get the right amount of information in it too, also I had a problem in my last week where I lost all site images, for all projects so spent many days having to put that right again.

​

What did I enjoy, and what went well?

I really enjoyed this project and challenging myself to create a game of my own. Although I would say I got off to a slowish start in deciding what I wanted to do, once I was clear I moved forward quicker, and my organisation throughout the project went quite well. I created a project plan with the week numbers which I updated from time to time on progression, and this helped me the most stay on track. This allowed me to see what I needed to do by a certain deadline and what I had left to complete.

​

I really enjoyed learning more skills in Maya and UE5 whilst developing my game and to see my final piece of work is really rewarding. It takes a lot of time to review feedback, carry out small improvements, figure out how to fix bugs, etc. but in the end, is very satisfying. Especially when you look back to where it started from concept development, the research in pre-production, and then eventually the production stage.

​

I enjoyed the graphics aspect of the project and was able to create an attractive environment suitable for a finished game. I had to be careful to not come away too much from creating a stylized game which I'd chosen from the outset and to keep in line with my research and target audience in mind. I spent time improving the background of the level to make it feel as if the environment would be much larger than it actually was and changing up the textures of the grass to make it look more dead and unmanaged definitely helped the look and feel that I wanted.

​

For the in-game and menu sounds, despite my first thoughts which were to learn how to create my own with various apps out there, I ended up not having set aside enough time.  However, I was still able to achieve the desired sound I wanted by finding suitable scary sounds online which I eventually narrowed down to one sound and used this for the gameplay, and also for the main menu.

By adding the in-game sound I created a more spooky atmosphere and this certainly adds a bit more to the game.

​

Regarding level design, I aimed to create a stylized environment. While the project mostly achieved the intended look and art style, I could have perhaps made the map smaller and continued to make improvements overall.

​

What could I have done better?

I see improvements that could be made throughout, which is fine as I think this will always happen no matter what game you develop. In particular, I would have liked to code the zombies into zombie types, so some can run faster than others, and do different things which would have given the game something a bit different.

​

What were some of the challenges I faced?

Making it so it really resembled a deserted city, but keeping the game in line with the stylized graphics I wanted. It was never going to be real life, like The Last Of Us, but nevertheless, I wanted to try and still make it as good as I could but with this in mind and not coming away from the type of stylized graphics I was intending.

​

In the initial map development stage I started making a sewer and spent at least a day working on that but came to realise it was taking way too long and I have gone above what I had intended which may throw out my timescale based on my project plan completely. So I decided to leave this out, which I was a bit disappointed but done so in order to keep everything moving along on time. 

​

I've had a few issues loading my main game file in UE5 and was crashing when getting to 80%. I lost valuable time with this which was really frustrating. In the future, I should make numerous backup copies of the working file on another drive so that I always have a good file saved in case something goes wrong, and I need to start everything again.

​

This final week I've had a big issue with the images I added to my site throughout the project. As my Wix site had run out of storage and asked me to pay monthly, I thought by deleting the images I'd uploaded to the media area of Wix would free up space. What I didn't realise is that by doing this all the images I had for all my projects were then deleted from my published pages. For some reason, the restore option didn't work which meant I have has to spend days adding images back into each project from scratch. Unfortunately, I no longer had them saved as files on my PC as thought I'd no longer need them. This has really set me back as I wanted to spend more time on my FMP this week however as all projects are being marked I've had to go back and figure out what images were missing and add new ones back in. 

​

What are the key things I have learnt?

Sticking to your plan and not letting your new ideas (like I mentioned on a sewer) distract you too much unless you have time to do it. So I have realised how important it is to work with a project plan from the beginning, keeping it updated throughout and if things don't go to plan, think of ways to work around it to keep it on track.

​

I have learnt the importance of the main menu as the first intro to a game and the first visual aspect the player will see. Taking time to review menus like The Last of Us II and Detroit: Become Human I can see the level of effort that is going into there to make them really interesting but without being annoying. I will be looking to do much more in the future around this.

​

I have also learnt not to delete images from your Wix site media folder as even though you have uploaded then to your site they still need to be stored in the media folder.

​

Looking back what would I have done differently?

As I didn't get time to finish the game as a whole which was for the player to search for a key to get back to the safe zone where they started, I would have perhaps spent less time on the environment making it so big. I even had it bigger than it is now, so I wasted even a lot of time on that. I also decided to add the sewer which didn't make it to the game as it was becoming too much to do, which was a shame. I think I would focus on a slightly smaller map to ensure i can get in all the ideas I have to make a really exciting game.

​

Summary

As I get to the end of my project, I have continued to learn a great deal and develop my skills. Despite some changes from my original plan (like starting the development of a sewer and making the map way too large), it has been a great achievement for me. I encountered lots of challenges and improved my time management along the way, yet I think this is my best work to date. It has further advanced my understanding of the many different aspects involved in game development.