Developing a mod for Friday Night Funkin

As a person who has a hobby of digital and traditional drawing, I’ve always made characters that have different personalities and characteristics among them. I was intrigued when I saw Friday Night Funkin. The fact that anyone can make original characters for themselves and tell a story, with it being a rhythm game where one could choose what kind of music they like, really interests me. Although it is not the same art style I use, it was always fun for me to try and learn how to digitally animate based on the aesthetics of that specific game. I love playing such digital games, and it would be really fun to experiment on modifying one, so I would like for me to make it somewhat beneficial for me since coding is involved during the development. Animating was also a hobby of mine back in elementary but somehow stopped since it was very taxing. However, after seeing what others did and after watching a couple of anime, I felt inspired to try to give digital animation another shot. Personal project is a wonderful opportunity for me to exercise this personal interest. Therefore, for my learning goal, I have decided to improve on my digital animation skills. Specifically, I want to learn how to develop an extension/mod to Friday Night Funkin to further enhance my digital drawing skills and also try to learn something new in terms of electronic coding, animation, and maybe a new artstyle. If I get to see actual development in my personal digital animation skills, I can potentially consider this as a future career. Since digital art is something I feel comfortable doing, maybe if I improve my digital animation skills, it could open a career path for me, specifically sprite-making or anything that relates to digital artwork graphics in world-building in digital games.

Product Goal

As a corresponding product goal to my established learning goal, an actual creative output comes to mind. I want to create an extension/mod through the global context of personal & cultural expression.

Reflection

There were several impacts that happened when I was developing my mod. The first one would be that I have gotten used to drawing in a completely different art style than what I used to. Although I did use an art style that was completely opposite to mine, I still was able to maintain the art style that I used on mainly every digital art I made.

Secondly, I learned more about animating and more about frame by frame animation. It took a while but with constant help and feedback I got, I was able to learn the gist in animating: using different techniques, different elements in animating (easing in and out, bounce, smear, overshoot, and more) and learning several different animation styles.

Thirdly, I learned coding. It was overwhelming at first but in the end I knew more about what to do. The different things I knew more about were the different json files, Lua scripts, xml files, and mainly about c sharp coding.

Product Evaluation

After some sleepless nights, I was able to finish my project. But to be honest I am still very unsatisfied with the final results. Some of the charting was out of sync and I was only able to do one of the cutscenes thus making the story of the game incomplete. The success criteria I applied into this project were aesthetics, gameplay, and thematic value. To me the aesthetics were decent, although that's my personal opinion. So I sent out my mod to my friends and gave them a forms sheet with the questions related to my success criteria.

As you can see from the reviews above It seems that I still have not gotten the colors for the art style right. But there were no bad reviews of how the sprite itself looks (Line art & character design) so I am glad for getting that right. Afterwards gameplay, to be honest I really procrastinated on this part. I was disappointed since this was one of the main parts of my mod and also my success criteria. As a result, I wasn’t able to give the player (or my friends at least) a hard enough charting.

As you can see from the results above, there was a lack of difficulty in the game. There were supposed to be 3 difficulties (easy, normal, hard). However, I was only able to complete the hard ones. But the problem here is that I’d have to click the normal difficulty in order to access the hard difficulty. Click any other difficulties and the game would crash. I should’ve removed the other difficulties, but I was already past my deadline so I just submitted as it is. For the thematic value, since the story was mostly not even there, it's disappointing for me and unfortunately I won’t be able to even grade myself for this.

From the responses above, there are still several issues within the mod that still need to be fixed. But other than that I still got positive feedback from the mod.

I still find the final results of my product unsatisfying but I’ve tried my best. If there is any time, I would like to do this again, I would have more experience and time the next time I venture into this again.