Date issued: 01/11/22

Final Submission: 10/01/23

Resubmission: 17/01/23

Video game development is a collaborative effort between, designers, artists, programmers and various departments for various processes. One thing that these processes have in common is the first step which is, research. Research is part of design, it is part of finance, it is part of marketing etc.

You will need to know how to conduct professional levels of research to be able to support your own projects and practices and this project will help you develop an understanding of this.

You will be going on a design journey through research. You will be designing a game influenced by research and creating an environment in unreal engine 5.

All of the work from each day will be recorded into your sites and the process will be reflected on.

Each project will be assessed after the deadline. This will give us an idea of your strengths as well as improvement points for the next project!

Purpose and context:

We are going to be looking at the purpose of research and how that helps support Games design and development. We will be exploring the difference between Primary and Secondary research. You will be learning how to analyse games for research through case studies.

You will have:

• Made a rough draft of an environment.

• Defined Primary and secondary research

• Analysed games for their environment design elements

• A research bank of inspirational material

  • mood boards (primary and secondary)

Purpose and context:

We will now look at the cultural and academic influences for games. Games Design sometime take inspiration for academic and cultural sources this might be to help portray an ancient civilisation or to help portray some factual information. We will be taking a look at how we can utilise these two to help our ideas.

You will have:

• You will define the difference between cultural and academic research

• You will exploring cultural research for the contextual purposes of your environment

  • • Demographics and representation in games

    • Current issues within the gaming industry

  • Primary and secondary cultural sources

  • Analysis of the results

Purpose and context:

The games industry is an industry that has recently developed in terms of progress and size. It still has its fair share of issues and controversies, we are going to be looking at representation in games and how that ties into the cultural aspects as well.

You will have:

• Analysed games for their equality, diversity and cultural portrayal.

• Application of research to your game idea and assets.

• Introduction to unreal and started the development of your idea in unreal

Purpose and context:

Now that you have some initial research, you will have a rough idea of what you want to design or create however, depending on the software that we have chosen chances are you are not sure how to do or create all of it or the industry practice for it. For this you will need to further embark onto the research journey to be able to see how the professionals do it.

You will have:

• Investigated into 3 tutorials

• Actioned the 3 tutorials in unreal.

• Defined the primary and secondary elements of the tutorials

• Analysis of the tutorials in relation to the subject of your research and the context of your idea

• Developmental screenshots of the practical processes in unreal engine

• Annotated your thought processes

Purpose and context:

You will now present your environment to an audience through a video showcase in order to gather research on the results of your design journey. You will be taking part in primary research to gain feedback and evaluate your assets and game idea.

You will have:

• Comparison of your initial design to a final design

• Survey or questionnaire

• Get audience feedback.

• Final evaluation

• Final reflection

Task 1

• Game idea for your game

• Primary and secondary research definition

• Analysed games for their design elements

• A research bank of inspirational material

  • mood boards (primary and secondary)

Task 2

• difference between cultural and academic research

• cultural research for your game idea

  • Primary and secondary cultural sources

  • Analysis of the results

Task 3

• Researched current news on the gaming industry representation

• 3 games analysed games for their equality, diversity and cultural portrayal.

• Application of research to your game idea and assets.

Introduction to unreal

• You will start developing an environment in unreal engine using external assets

Task 4

• Investigated into 3 tutorials

• Application of the tutorials in the context of your game idea

• Started developing your 3 Environment from the tutorials

• Processes for the developmental process for your environment prototype.

• A video showcasing the prototype.

Task 5

• Comparison of your initial design to a final design

• Survey or questionnaire

• Get audience feedback on your game idea and prototype

Task 6

• Final evaluation

• Final reflection

Unit 2