PRODUCTION - WEEK NINE

This week I got a video from one of my tutors on areas I need to work on. He went over my blog and looked at each part to find issues. I got this feedback on the first day of week nine, and it was one of my main tasks for this week. My main goal for this week to start with was working on the issues that turned up and making sure I had all my mechanics in. Instead, I chose to work on this, as the written work is more important overall. I believe my work is at a good standard, so instead, I will work on the blog.

I have watched the video, making sure to catalogue each issue he brought up. This will help me understand what issues I have to work on and what needs fixing. The issues ranged from adding more work to missing work, and I decided to write them all into to list. From this list, I will work on fixing each issue over this week. I added some of my own over the week as they appeared. This was to help me improve the work, as I looked critically at what I had already included.

The list of issues are I need to add my Unity VFX graph research. To add research on the engine and decide on what to use. To mention What option there is to program in for unity. Add my research into optimization for code and visuals. To improve on the weekly production log, mainly on weeks 3-4. To analyse the Why when reflecting and explain the How. To ensure, I show before and afters when detailing problems. Lastly, talk about the presentations of the final product.

For the first part, I decided to work on adding engine research and deciding on what to use for the project. For this, I added a page for the engine research on my blog where I detailed all my research. Starting with covering all the engines and their strength and weaknesses, I went over all the issues and why they made the specific engine a bad choice. This helped me to understand my Unity is a better choice compared to the competition. I found at least one issue with each other engine and why it did not fit our needs. This helped outline the best option for the program, and I believe I did a good job in the selection of engines to look at.

The next part of the week is working on what programming language to use when making the code. This is an extension of the first goal and is on the same page. The first part of this was to decide on an engine, as it decides the language. Each engine has its own, but as we chose to use Unity, the only option is C#. I went over the history of the engine and what languages it used to have, but now, it has only one option. I still went over C# and what it is, so I did gain a better understanding of the language as a whole. This will help me when writing up my work. 

Lastly, for this, I went over the options for programs that can be used to write code. These called IDEs are responsible for opening and editing the files used for code scripts. There are many options in the industry, all having their main benefits. Here I went over why Visual Studios was the best option for me. I believe this outlined why it was the best choice, plus it helped me have a clear knowledge of what I was going to use. I could have looked into more options and delved deeper into them, but I am happy with the results.

Next from the video and for the last of the first three days, I wanted to work on the planning for the final product. Here I aimed to get a few methods to showcase my projects and expand on what makes them a good way to show off my work. This was a way for me to understand the form that can be used to showcase my work and develop my skills. In the end, I came up with four ways to showcase my work, each helping differently. Looking back, I am happy with the options I made e, and I am glad I used all the methods instead of one. I decided to do this because each had its strengths and weaknesses compared to the other. I would not change much about how I approached this, but I wish I had gone into more detail on how and why I made the choices I did. Furthermore, I am happy with the fact each method shows something different. This allows the player to get a different approach for each aspect of my work.

Looking at this I am happy I added this as my tutor suggested because I am happy with how it improved my work and lead to a better final project overall. 

For the next few days, I wanted to focus on some of the issues I found, first focusing on the layout of the blog. I aim to improve the overall layout of the blog and ensure my work is easy to find. The issue I found was that there were a lot of subpages to get to my research, and many pages were flooding the menu on my blog. I worked on fixing this by adding a main page to hold the items and adding each one as a link on that page. This made it, so I could hide the pages and sort them on my blog page instead. 

I am happy with the outcome of this clean up as I do believe the old look was worse overall as it was clogged and messy. I am happy with the new look and think it makes my page better overall. Furthermore, I believe I hit the goal I had in mind and made a better experience for the reader.

Next for this week, I wanted to add the research missing on my page. This was pointed out in the video feedback that I had missed putting on my VFX and shader graph research on my blog. This was helpful as I had made the page but had not published the page. So on this page that I had added, I decided to publish it to my blog. This page contains all my research on my shader and VFX graph, and it is necessary to show off my work and how I got to it.

Looking back I am glad that the tutor pointed this out as if missing it would have taken back from my overall research making my work not make sense. This would have led to a worse project overall and guaranteed a worse mark for the final project. I now know for next time that I should ensure I am publishing all my work when I send it off, to ensure I have all my work done and logged.