Reflection

My evaluation will cover all of the things that i think went well and also what went wrong when creating this project. For a brief overview of my project and what i aimed to create was a horror game that is set in an apartment building and you as the main character have to escape the apartment building after you wake up one morning and find yourself being the only building left for as far as you can see the game features things like a stamina mechanic and flashlight mechanics as well as much more. The reason me and my team chose to do a horror game is due to the fact that there isn’t many horror games that people play for prolonged periods of time as the shelf life for most horror games has been no longer than 2 months and so we thought why not create a horror game with a different way of completing it compared to usual horror games that just have you running around and doing a couple of things like finding a key to escape but with our horror game what we plan to do is make quests where you have to really think about what to do instead of just mindlessly running around trying to escape, this is so that the game has a better feeling of immersion as the person playing the game will have to think as though they are actually the character this is good for the game as if people are immersed into the game not only will it make them want to play the game more but it will also be better for when they do get jump scared as it will be more shocking to them as they will not expect it at the most random moments. With this game i also wanted to create a horror game as there is a lot of mechanics that are sort of unique to horror games or not unique as such but they are mostly only seen inside of horror games and so if i can execute them well in the horror game it can get me thinking about how i can use these mechanics in different genres of games.

The time planner was useful as it gave a structure for when the game should be done by and when other things should be completed by. This gave me a good rough idea as for when i should be completing what certain piece of the project before moving onto the next thing for the project, unfortunately though due to many factors i wasn’t able to fully utilise the time plan due to members of my team going on holiday for 2 weeks with them not being able to do any work and also for some of the weeks there wasn’t any communication from some of the team members which didn’t help in the production of the game. All of the time plan was thought out pretty good and peers and tutors said that it looked like a good schedule so next time i will also create a similar schedule.

Within my team we didn’t really have any planning stages and we just worked sort of in the order that we had done the time plan originally we were going to have a planning document but it never ended up getting made, now that the project is finished thought i definitely think that having a plan for different stages of the project would have been useful for us in our production for the game as a whole and stopped us from falling behind on schedule as there was things such as the concept artist made concepts for the 3D artist to make in Maya that would then be used in the game but it ended up not being done on time which meant that the game had no models from members of the team such as furniture and such however they were created later on it’s just that it was too late to add them into the game as i was already focused on making the mechanics inside of the game work. If i could do it again however i would make sure that there is some sort of plan in place as well as a weekly checklist to make sure that each member of the team is doing what they should have done for that specific week as this would have solved a lot of problems with me and the team running behind on time for the project which ended up with us not having a fully finished game.

The primary research that i conducted was sending out a questionnaire about what types of things my peers would like to see in a horror game in the current day, the research was definitely helpful and made the process of me and my team deciding what we want to be in the game or what she should have included in the game a lot easier, all of the info that we got from the questionnaire was really reliable and relevant to the current time as all of the people who filled out the questionnaire are people who play games and because i asked them at the current moment it gave me results and answers from the current time period instead of me finding some article from a few years ago that is no longer relevant to how people feel about horror games and what they would like to see in a horror game now. A lot of the results were pretty much what i expected and all of the results can be found within my site on the production log page as well as it showing what questions i decided to pick and why i picked them with an explanation for each question as well as doing the same for the results to make sure that i analysed why i think they were chosen as the most popular choice. Because i made the questions only have 4 answers to choose from it made sure that my questions were effective as people wouldn’t be sending tons of random answers that don’t relate to the question and as well as this i made sure to choose appropriate questions that relate to the game as i needed to make sure that i got the best results and answers from all of the info i managed to get. The research impacted the project and decision making process as it laid out what the game should include as well as what people would like to see in a horror game. I don’t think there was much that i would change as it all went to plan but maybe at the end of the questionnaire i should have added something like “what else would you like to see in a horror game?” as this could have given some extra info as to what people want to see in the game.

The secondary research that i conducted was more so for finding out how to create certain mechanics for inside of the game such as how to create a flashlight that can toggle on and off and also loses its battery over time as well as being able to find battery pickups that will charge up the battery back to full. These tutorials definitely impacted my work a lot and helped in making the game more interactive which can help with immersion in the game which is a key point when keeping people engaged in the game, all of the tutorials that i used were reliable and useful and all worked when doing them for the first time without me having to go back and do them again to see what went wrong. Through other research that i did about horror buildings in movies and such is that they can either have a really worn down feel to them or they can look brand new which gives them an eerie sense and there is some that are a bit in the middle and has a clean sense to them with also some worn down areas and i think that a mix of both is probably the best way of doing it. If i could change what i did when doing secondary research i would try and find tutorials way before k actually start doing production so that i don’t have to find a tutorial and then do it straight away as having a few tutorials about the same thing and comparing them could have helped me get some better results.

The overall production of the game was sort of all over the place within my team as there was a 3 week period near the start of the project where 2 people were on holiday so we couldn’t do any work while there which definitely impacted the work flow of the games production and lead to a somewhat unfinished product, because of the fact that our team had lots of time lost we were all sort of working on doing our own respective things within the game and so we sort of lost track of us working together and sharing ideas after the first few weeks this definitely made an impact on us due to the fact that we were all split into different roles with us having a 3D modeller 2D artist etc. One thing that was good working with a team is that whenever i needed feedback on something such as the stamina mechanic inside of the game i could easily ask one of my team members what they thought about it and if there was anything that i should to in order to improve it and make it better than it currently was. One thing that i am glad about is that the research and planning that we did together helped out a lot for getting ideas about what the game should look like and how it should feel so that definitely gave me quite a few ideas on how to change the game and how it looks. My time management is something that definitely needs to be improved as there was many days mostly on the weekends that i forgot about doing work for the project which definitely didn’t help in my favour and is something that i am going to work on next time i do a project. I did learn quite a few new things such as creating a true first person camera by using the third person camera template and character model and then instead of having the camera be a third person view you can actually attach the camera to the characters head which makes it a much better realistic first person look rather then using the first person template camera as with the new method i found there is a much more immersive depth to the game when using it as if you look down you can see your characters body and legs instead of just floating arms. Some knowledge that i gained that benefitted me whilst doing this project is not so much related to knowledge in the project but more so how i work on projects as i found i need to set a certain time in the day where i work on the project and then do what i want to do in my spare time after i have accomplished something while creating the game as i definitely underestimated the amount of time that is actually need to create a fully completed good project.

The outcome of my project was that i had a simple map with some mechanics such as sprinting with stamina as well as a flashlight that could be toggled on and off and slowly ran out of battery that could be recharged by finding more battery packs. I definitely didn’t meet my goals and aims that i had wanted from the start of the project as i would have liked to had a fully working game prototype but all i was able to create was just a simple map with different mechanics in the game which can be useful as a show of what the game could include but i definitely learned that if i want to create a full game that i need to spend a lot more time when creating the game so i am not entirely satisfied with how i did but with the knowledge that i gained from this project i now know what to do going forwards when creating a full game with different levels, while i am not really satisfied with not being able to make the full game with multiple levels i am still glad that i managed to get some of the mechanics that i would have wanted in the game to be included. Due to the fact that i didn’t fully develop what i had in mind for my original proposal i would say that there is a lot that i could do to improve the game and make it a lot better than it is right now but as it is the end of the project there isn’t much that i can do now but i wont let this impact me and i will do even better next time.

For my final thoughts on this project i would say that the outcomes that i have gained from doing this is that i have become a lot more confident when working in unreal engine and where everything is located as well as improving my knowledge in the blueprinting side of things as they are great tools for adding to the game like scripts and stuff that make the game feel more immersive, i definitely feel that i have a long way to go before i fully master unreal to the point that i know how to do everything but with the progress that i have made already i don’t think that i am that far off. One of the main things that i realised while working on this project is that it can be really difficult trying to get work done and then realising that you have other priorities that you need to do so to make a game perfect you rest have to sacrifice a lot of your hours at home to working on the game. For the future,  i am going to try and create a schedule for myself where i do a few hours of working on the game before i do anything else as this would help me a lot especially if i am trying to do other things in the day so it would be good to get it done and out of the way before focusing on something else. My areas for development are definitely going to be time management and staying on track as there was quite a lot of times where i ended up getting distracted while trying to find a tutorial for something and then i end up seeing a random youtube video that is unrelated and wasting a lot of time that i could have therefore been using to finish off the game at a quicker rate.