Proposal

My preferred specialism in games development is certainly programming. Since I started the course, I have always been drawn to programming and have learnt many different skills and techniques to create multiple projects and games throughout my time. I also have skills in other areas of development such as animation which I come across on my programming projects.

I will be using my programming passion and skills to create a unique and advanced movement system that allows the player to move quickly across the level. This will could include some unique mechanics such as grappling, rocket jumping, wall running and jetpacks. These mechanics would come together to create a fast system so the player is constantly moving and on their toes. Movement is a slight grey area where I have experience with 2D and 3D movement but not at a complex level. This could pose as a fair challenge to me and will put my programming skills to the test. 

I also aim to push myself out of my comfort zone and try my hand at creating some animations for the player models which include idle animations, moving animations, grappling animations, crouching animations and wall running animations. This will definitely be a challenge and an opportunity to learn as I have little experience with animation. This will be the area of main focus after programming as this will be the most difficult for me.

When I first started this games design course, I knew next to nothing about each subject of game development. I started to learn the basics during my first few units and acquired basic skills in programming, 3D modelling, animation and concept design. Unit 1 taught me the basics of 2D and 3D animation, here I animated a 2D basketball bouncing which taught me how to properly use keyframes and the importance of the principles of animation. The techniques shown in the principles of animation help greatly with producing higher-quality animations. I used the squash and stretch technique on the ball to help it look smoother. These skills could help me animate the player model for this project. 

Units 2 and 4 taught me the importance of high-quality research of both primary and secondary which also assisted in me presenting these details in video format. This helped me build confidence in my presenting and research skills, which for this project, allows me to create detailed primary and secondary research. Unit 3 gave me solid experience in working in a group environment and stepping out of my comfort zone with programming. This helped develop my personal skills such as time management, communication and teamwork which will assist me on this project. As I am working in a group of 5, these skills are essential to the projects success. 

Unit 5 allowed me to experiment with audio for games, which taught me how much of a role audio plays in the experience of a game. This experience can help me add more detail to my game by adding some sounds to movement mechanics. Unit 6 gave me experience in designing a concept for a robot and bringing it to life by modelling it and attempting to texture it. These skills are helpful for me to assist the designers of the group. Unit 7 is where I created a 2D game by myself and programmed it in Unity. This project allowed me to ignite my passion in programming and I have since developed my skills into a specialty. This heavily ties into my role in this project as I will be developing an essential mechanic of the game, which is movement. Unit 8 tied my skills in the other units together, which was my final project of the year. This allowed me to use all of my learnt skills in one project. The project consisted of me programming a basic AI driver for a racing game. 

During my second year, I covered units 9-12, starting with unit 9, I was involved in a group project to create a gaming experience for a museum, that involved researching non-European mythology. I created some puzzle mechanics in the game with an Egyptian theme. This further developed my skills of working in a team which will come in perfectly for this project in terms of communication and teamwork. I also improved my ability to generate a game idea on a specific theme. In unit 10, I developed a fantasy level within a team of 2. Here I learned how to properly design a level in a game which will assist me greatly in this project as my role is advanced movement. This will allow me to create a fun and highly controllable movement system that reacts and plays well to the environment. This also helped my teamwork and communication skills as well as my 3D modelling as I created some assets for the level. 

Unit 11 involved me creating a show reel for my professional development. This allowed me to take full control of my speciality and properly show off my abilities in programming. The programming skills I learnt in this unit will help greatly with how fast I program the movement and how effective it is. This unit also helped me present my final products effectively and neatly. Finally, unit 12 was the emerging technologies essay, this unit involved me researching a different technology in the games industry such as home consoles, and analysing the history of the consoles, how successful they were and determining the future of the technology. This unit taught me how to properly Harvard references and write a professional essay regarding a specific topic.

To conclude this rationale, I have learnt from every unit from the course and will use every one of these skills to create a complex and intricate final project that has a high level of planning, research, production and evaluation. I plan to use effective communication with my team to boost our level of teamwork and production together.

After this project, my goal will be to attend a University game programming course to further develop my skills in programming. I have a great ambition to complete the course in University and aim to achieve a job role in a team as a programmer and develop games professionally. 

This Final project will involve a team of 5 members, me, Kyle Williams, Alex Needham, Zak Annetts and Joseph Bowman. Together, we aim to create a multiplayer first person shooter which will feature a variety of weapons to choose from that spawn on the map. The player will be able to switch from 4 different weapons that have been picked and are able to use their weapon of choice. There will be a simple game mode of free for all where each player is their own team, a team deathmatch where there is 2 teams or even capture the flag. Each game will last around 10 minutes spread between 3 rounds, this also depends on the game mode but should be around the same. The weapons will function like most in first person shooters and will be balanced accordingly and may have some smooth animations.

My role in this project will be to design the whole movement of the game for all players and create some animations with these movements. The game will feature advanced movement which will allow the player to constantly move around the map at incredibly fast speeds. The movement will also feature a few mechanics to help create the fast pace environment such as a grappling mechanic which will allow the player to either pull themselves towards an object at fast speed or swing normally from an object. An additional jump boosting mechanic will help the player stay in the air for longer. This will give the player an extra boost in the air like a jetpack but has a small use time. The boost will recharge and be ready to use again when the player next touches the floor, this is to keep the game balanced as players could just be infinitely in the air if not. Sliding will help the place move around on the ground as it provides a small speed boost. These movements will also involve some animations to help make the players look realistic and have some smooth movement when doing different actions.

The controls of the game will be like most standard shooters, WASD to move around, shift will allow the player to sprint, space allows the player to jump, control will allow the player to crouch. The player will be able to use these controls to do some movement actions such as climb ladders and mantle onto edges of buildings, walls and containers.

We will make the game free as it is a small game which can be downloaded as a ZIP file but may expand upon it at a later date and make it a paid game at a small price. The game will be made in Unity as most of the team members are more familiar with the game engine. We also plan to make a functioning demo of the game for the final product. We plan to use a variety of products to develop this project such as Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter and Unity. Finally I plan to create surveys and have others test my movement mechanics to get feedback to help me improve the movement and fix any issues that may arise in development.

In summary, my main goals in this project is to create a functional advanced movement system that allows the player to traverse the map quickly. The mechanics I will be developing along side this are grappling and double jumping to give the movement a more advanced feel. After this, my goal is to create some animations to make the game look more realistic.

To evaluate this project, I will be looking at a few things. I will create a weekly log of the work I have completed each week in the form of a PowerPoint and critique my work during each week. This will evaluate exactly what I did, how I could improve and what exactly went well. During each week I plan to have a meeting with my team to discuss how their work is going and how it could be improved, this will improve our team work and communication skills. I will use a Trello page to keep track of bug fixes and any issues with staying on track. To log this work efficiently I will create a PowerPoint at the end of each week and present every piece of work I produced during that week. I will also add reflection, evaluation and any worries that I have for the project.

For the final reflection of this project, I will look over the entire project as a whole and reflect on my efforts and all the work I did. I will reflect on how well the mechanics work, if there are any bugs in the system and any additions or general improvements that I could have done for the project. I will also look upon specific skills and techniques that I learned for during the project and evaluate how useful they are for the future. I will also analyse if I met my weekly goals throughout the project and if not, analyse why the goals were not achieved. I will keep track of my goals on a Trello page which keeps it organised.

Also during my final reflection and evaluation, will look at both my industry and personal skills, I will fully analyse my industry skills in programming, 3D modelling, UV texturing, animation and concept/illustration. For my personal skills I will analyse my confidence, motivation, engagement, time management and communication. I will also reflect on these skills on the weekly logs which will help me improve my personal skills.

I also will get adequate feedback from my peers throughout the project, ideally every week as this will give me a great insight as to what exactly should be improved, fixed or added to the project. I will add this to my own personal reflection to determine exactly which areas I need to improve and which areas are of quality. I will ask them to look at each mechanic of my movement and receive adequate feedback of what they like and what they do not like.

The research of this project will consist of in depth research that is both primary and secondary research. My primary research will consist of surveys at the start, middle and end of the project. I will use google forms as the format of these surveys and I will ask a variety of questions based on the different mechanics I will be creating, for example, I will ask what others think about fast paced movement. 

At the start of the project I will produce two surveys for my primary research, this will consist of a survey regarding movement in different first person shooter games. This will cover topics such as unique mechanics in fast paced environments such as grappling and jump boosting. I will cover which movement type players prefer out of slow/tactical and fast/advanced movement and why they prefer it. I will also ask which shooter games people have played and ask them to write some notable and enjoyable mechanics from their mentioned games' movement. 

I will make another survey at the start of the survey based on animations which will cover if people think smooth movement animation is important in a shooter game and why, which games they think have smooth movement animations and which parts make them smooth and finally, if players prefer to see their enemies animation be detailed or simple.

Next, I will make another survey to monitor my progress at around the middle of the project, this will be during the production stage of the project and I will have produced the movement and mechanics to basic levels. This survey will include questions based off if the movement is good and is headed in the right direction, if there is problems with the movement and if there should be any additions or tweaks to the movement. I will ask the same questions about the animation I will have done to see if its of quality and if any improvements should be made. For the last of the primary research, I will make one final survey at the end of the project to show my final product of the movement and animation. 

My secondary research will consist of YouTube tutorials as these are extremely helpful if I am struggling on a specific task. I will also look at movement from a variety of shooter games to get an understanding of how exactly movement works and how much the feel of the movement can vary. This can be from games I have played before or I can even look for credible sources online to describe how the movement works and feels. Some credible sources I may look for online are articles, websites and user reviews on games. A big issue I could run into is bias and a few credibility issues especially on user reviews as these can be made be anyone which means they could have bias towards their favoured and unfavoured games. If I do run into these issues then I can reflect on the problems I run into and aim to improve my researching skills. 

A major topic I will be researching is the movement. This will range from how the advanced movement feels and plays, how mechanics such as grappling and jump boosting will affect the feel of the movement and how fast the movement should be. I will also be researching how exactly I can program this movement to work as it needs to be fluent and efficient. The animation will also be heavily researched as I need to figure out how I not only rig the player models but animate a few different animations for them.

Some research will be done on some general things for the game such as target audience, gender ratio, age rating, price and platforms the game will be released on. This will be collaborative research for the project and my role for this research will be the average play time of each round/match of the game.