Week 1:

The first week of The Konami Code project mostly involved the introduction to the project and involved us playtesting and analysing the first of the two games that we planned to recreate, the first of which was Micro Machines. The project starting off with us analysing the Micro Machines game and noting down important game mechanics, art styles and overall gameplay that we thought was key to include in our recreated versions. This analysis task was very important to not only understand how Micro Machines plays and feels but also to get an understanding of what was expected to be included in our recreations. Overall, I feel that I now have a large understanding of the crucial elements that I need to include in my game to ensure that it does not stray to far away from the core playstyle of Micro Machines. Furthermore, I now believe that this project will greatly improve my game design and programming, as this is the first non-platformer style game (apart from the endless runner) that we will be creating,  and I was told that this project would involve a lot of coding and AI implementation. 

Week 2:

The second week of the project involved a lot of hands-on practical work that tested my programming abilities and stretched my knowledge even further than before. The week started with a simple recap and improvement task on pixel art, for this task I created an array of top-down vehicles and incorporated three frame animations to each vehicle. These vehicles included three 16x16 cars, three 16x16 boats, two 32x32 trucks and two 32x32 jet skis. This task was an important task in ensuring a recap on pixel art and also helped me to improve my art design to ensure consistent shading and animations. During the task we received periodic feedback that allowed us to improve our designs ensuring consistency. After, we moved into the planning phase of the project, this planning phase was very crucial in allowing us to set out what we intend to create and how the track design looks and flows for the player. This planning task was again another recap from another lesson, but allowed us to improve further on the previous planning knowledge to ensure a smooth lead into next week when we will start creating our final recreated game. We also carried out some very important experimentation on how to program and implement hazards, boosts and AI opponents that followed a track that was planned out with posts. These tasks built on my previous Construct 3 knowledge and ensured that I would have all the appropriate knowledge before I moved onto recreating the game. I was really pleased with the amount of progress that I had made in my understanding on AI implementation and I look forward to adding this to my final game and projects beyond this. The AI pathfinding was very hard to grasp at first try, but by the end of the session I had programmed five AI cars that vary in speed, and I was also able to add a main menu screen that allows the player to choose a car out of the five that they want to play as in the race, this disables the pathfinding function on the chosen car allowing it to be played with keyboard, whilst the four other cars follow the pathfinding route.

Week 3:

The final week of the Micro Machines project was a busy and fun week that required me to collate all of my knowledge gained from the previous weeks and use it to build the final game. I really enjoyed this final week as I was able to show off all of my knowledge and I was able to overcome some problems that arose through the development process, for example my pathfinding would randomly disable and the cars would drift off of the track and the sound effects played within the game would loop to create an annoying jumble of noises. I reflected back to my experimentation and found that my pathfinding was not working because the checkpoints were too far apart and the sound effects would loop because the variable that called the sound effect was repeating every tick, so I removed the variables and opted for a global Boolean as this was easier to toggle on and off. Also, the use of the Booleans helped when it came to implementing volume toggles. If I was to redo this project I would expand on the track selection and offer a wider variety of tracks and I would also add a car customisation feature as this would add more personality to the game.  

Week 4:

The first week of the Space Invaders project in the Konami Code project involved me carrying out a playtest analysis, this analysis was very important and helpful in building my understanding of Space Invaders and what mechanics the game uses, so I can replicate this in my Space Invaders inspired game. Also, I carried out contextual research on Game Design and the fundamental elements that are key to game design. This helped me to work on my game design knowledge and will help me when it comes to using my game design knowledge in this project and further beyond. Also, I worked on pixel art and core mechanics experimentation and idea generation, the experimentation was the most important task throughout this project because it allowed me to build the knowledge of how to create a Space Invaders game, without this there would be no final game. In addition to this, the idea generation was extremely helpful in planning out potential ideas and allowed me to choose one of three ideas that I would go onto create, this was great as I had a set plan of what I needed to create. 

Week 5:

The final week of the project comprised of me developing my final game and improving it based on feedback. The creation of the game was quick and to a strict deadline, but I love the time constraints because it reflects the working conditions in industry and in the FMP. Overall, I was really pleased with the final game and the feedback was helpful in improving this. The feedback and playtest session was good in providing possible improvements and allowed me to meet the requirements of the players, however the feedback varied in quality so most of it was not relevant to the project. 

Evaluation - Micro Machines project

Evaluation - SPace Invaders project

In the Space Invaders project I was tasked with the brief of creating a Space Invaders inspired game that used the same mechanics as the original game but uses a new theme, I progressed through multiple stages before I started to create the game in Construct 3 and these stages significantly helped me to prepare for this. I enjoyed this project as it allowed me to experiment with different mechanics that I probably would not have experimented with if I was not to have carried out this project. Also, I enjoyed working with a strict deadline and brief because it allowed me to understand and adjust to the workings of industry and the Final Major Project. The main brief of the project called for me to create a re-skinned Space Invaders game that consisted of: A main menu, settings page, sound setup, controls setup, two levels each with increasing difficulty and different soundtracks and the levels must include a player, enemies, lives, scores, barriers and projectiles. I believe that I met this brief perfectly as my game incorporates all of this and more, whilst sticking to the original mechanics.

The first stage of this project was to playtest Space Invaders and write an analysis report based on the gameplay, controls, art, playstyle and overall design of the game. This was extremely important to the project as it gave me an introduction into Space Invaders and the style of game that I would have to re-skin, also it was very helpful in allowing me to recognise areas of the game that were key to the feel of Space Invaders and that I would need to use in my game for example the increasing speed of the enemies: "This game increases in difficulty very quickly and it does this by increasing the speed of the aliens based upon the amount of aliens left and the closeness of the player to the aliens. The speed of the aliens becomes unbearable and it becomes almost impossible for the player to shoot the aliens as the player cannot shoot that fast and ultimately move that fast.". Overall, the analysis stage was imperative to this project as without this playtest and analysis I would have no clue as to how Space Invaders plays and how I would go about creating a re-skinned version.

The next phase of the project was experimentation, this experimentation covered a range of mechanics and behaviours that would be required in my re-skinned space invaders game. This phase covered everything from pixel art, AI Tile Movement and the implementation of barriers. I found this stage to be the most important stage of the whole project as these areas of experimentation allowed me to prepare for the creation of my game and without this knowledge I would have found the creation stage extremely time consuming, considering the length of this project I don't think I would have finished on time without this experimentation stage. If I was to carry out this experimentation stage again I would experiment with breakable floors as I was unable to successfully execute this for the final game. 

The planning stage allowed me to nail down the final idea for the theme of game I was going to re-skin my Space Invaders game on. I liked this stage as I was able to build on my idea generation skills and I was able to narrow down my ideas from three to one. The use of the idea generation helped me to plan out three possible ideas and evaluate which idea would best suit the mechanics of Space Invaders. If I was to redo the planning stage I would definitely create level blueprints as these help me to plan out the layout of my game and its UI so I have a solid idea of layout before I move onto creating the final game.

During the project I also carried out contextual referenced research into game design and the most important elements to game design. This contextual research report allowed me to dive into the different elements in game design and encouraged me to gather a lot of useful information from industry professionals. All of the game design information from this report I plan to use in my upcoming work and in projects beyond this one.

The creation of the game, Minecraft Raiders allowed me to showcase my pixel art, game design, programming and Construct 3 knowledge, whilst also expanding my knowledge on sprite behaviours. Overall, I really enjoyed creating this game and can not wait to follow my own path in the final major project. After creating the game, I conducted a playtest and feedback session that involved me and other classmates evaluating and providing feedback on the game at its current version. The feedback session ran smoothly, but I did not receive as detailed feedback as I had hoped, the feedback gathered highlighted some improvements for my game, but other play testers feedback was very irrelevant and in no way helpful to the improvement of my game. 

"Kevin Rodrigues Feedback:

-Any bugs, if so, what are they?

Not any that I could see

-Does the game have sound

Nope

-Can you complete the game

I think? Nothing happens after everyone dies

-Rate difficulty

3

-Rate fun

5

- Areas for improvement

Maybe make it more difficult?

This feedback by Kevin was not very helpful, as it did not go into detail about what needed improving or not. This feedback does not give enough information to make it relevant or in any way helpful to the improvement of my game. In addition to this, I can interpret that the game functioned as expected, but they needed it to be more difficult, I do not agree with this as the game scales in difficulty and the second level is extremely difficult to complete so I do not know why it needs to be more difficult as no other play testers found this an issue. The game does include sound and it clearly states on the main menu that audio can be adjusted in the settings page, two soundtracks are present as well as sound effects for the player, AI, Barriers, game completion and projectile fire. So I do not know why the play tester wrote “No Audio”. Overall this feedback was not very helpful and I do not intend to adjust my game based on this feedback." After reviewing all of the feedback, I applied the relevant improvements to my game to finish off the final improved version of the Minecraft Raiders game. If I was to carry out this playtest and feedback session again I would expand the test group to more than four play testers as this way I would have received a larger array of responses and possible improvements, instead of mixed feedback that mostly consisted of irrelevant information.        

Looking back through the stages in this project and in previous projects, I am really happy with the outcome of the game and the level of detail that I applied throughout. In addition to this, I was very pleased with the level of improvement that I had made in the project and can not wait to apply all of my knowledge to the upcoming final major project. If I was to recreate the game I would definitely include a player selection option, so each player would have unique projectiles and stats that would effect the play style. Also, I would include a larger array of levels and enemy variety, e.g. I could create a new level where the player would have to defeat the Ender Dragon.