Personal Reflection

This trimester has been quite interesting and I feel I have learnt a great deal about being an effective designer and leader figure. I believe both my soft and hard skills have increased over the past trimester however struggle to recall a lot of what I've learned as it is easy to learn something new and have it fall into your long term memory banks without realizing it has happened. That being said I'll do my best to cover the work I have done over the past trimester and the knowledge I have obtained working on the projects and with the team at the end.

Sorrow

Sorrow was the one week project were players control a character who's goal is to help as many people as possible while running the risk of gaining negative effects to his own mental state.

I am quite pleased with the projects I have completed this trimester. The goal was to overwhelm players with stress of helping others and make them feel bade for taking time for themselves. Sorrow wasn't just a lot of fun to make but turned out as intended. Of course there were a few changes made that weren't apart of the original design and I would have liked to alter if I had given myself the time. The primary one was the ending. By removing an end state players were meant to feel the constant and overwhelming stress of being the sort of person who cares for others but never takes the time to care for themselves. Unfortunately the intended result did not take effect, instead players assumed the game was not finished as their was no ending, even a lose would have sufficed. Thankfully the majority of players understood what the message was so I consider this project an overall success.

I didn't get the proper animations in, although I have made the and they work. Because of the way I made the sprites the animator in Unity did not like me using a single framed sprite with the walk animations. However, thanks to what I've learned about animating in Unity (and animating in general), I now know how to split up animations in Unity via time frames. This means I can have all the animations for each sprite in one Gif and split them up based on the time they begin and end. I am yet to test if this actually works with 2D animations but as it works with 3D I believe it will work the same. This will be useful for the personal projects I intend to start over the holidays, both my 2D and 3D game ideas can use this technique.

This is also the first time I have used separate sprites for one entity. As I needed to change the facial expressions of the player character and NPCs and keep them walking I didn't want to create a massive sprite sheet with variations of the characters' walk cycle with different expressions. So instead I made a sprite sheet for the walk cycles but had the heads separated. I am very pleased with how effective this was and will no doubt use it again in the future. I felt that players would become more emotional when the NPC's died so I took inspiration from The Binding Of Isaac and modeled the characters after the Isaac character.

There were some things I struggled with on this project, mainly the spawn cycle for the NPCs. I wanted to spawn a set amount in random locations over a series of waves. With the help from Ian and Sean I was able to complete this task and learn a bit more about for and while loops.

Apart from scripting, which I always feel I need to improve, audio is the only thing I am not confident about. I made the sound effects for this game myself but they turned out terribly and were unfortunately removed from the final product. I understand how to format audio and use the proper software, but making sound effects to record is not my strong point.

First Horror

First Horror, originally called First Day Horrors, was about a young girl being terrified of her first day of school. It visually shows her emotions as a dark and terrifying forest filled with monsters. The goal of the player is to reach the gate at the end while pushing back the monsters using the light of the child's teddy bear.

I was unsure if this game would create the intended emotion from the players. Thankfully the horror aspect work better than I anticipated. By making the player a young child, having the camera high, creepy sound effects and jump scares players were meant to feel as the child would, frightened, alone and afraid to move forward. I took inspiration from Dead Space after watching a video about how it's effects were created. A lot of the sound effects and sudden changes to the environment were merely meant to scare players and didn't put them in any actual danger. I did this with the sound effects and wolf that runs past the player.  I remember hearing that people, both male and female, are more protective over female children than male,  however I'm not sure how accurate this is, this is why I went with a female child for the player character.

I also tried to incorporate film theory into this game by having quiet moments just before a jump scare or an attack. After attempting this I learnt that in films they actually give the audience a chance to begin a moment of relief before suddenly scaring them. Just something to remember for future projects.

Unfortunately the final scene was incomplete because the teacher animation wasn't working. I'm not entirely sure what the issue was, the animation would run just fine in the editor but screwed up in the scene and builds. I was unable to fix this issue before the final play through.

I was also required to create some of the models for the environment and didn't get the teacher animations until the night before the final build was due. This is when I decided to work on being a better team leader for the third project.

As a bit of an added effect I wanted to create fading transitions between scenes. This gave me the opportunity to learn about lerping the color/opacity of images and use coroutines. There is still a lot I need to learn about scripting but I feel my current amount of knowledge will allow me to create my own publishable projects in the future.

Zurvivor

Zurvivor was the major team project shown at the gallery exhibition. It is a four player non-violent survival game where players are trapped for five days in a zombie infested town. They must gather food and medicine and remain uninfected when help arrives.

The primary goal was to create distrust between players and by giving them a means to back stab one another I believe this goal was met. Although we had some major communication issues during this project I am pleased with how it turned out. Players act as intended, the game allowed them to both use teamwork, work alone or completely stab the other players in the back to survive. The documentation could have been done much sooner, before production started in fact. I did, however, learn a template to use for writing the various documents including the design documents, team and project management, and gantt charts.

I also learnt a lot about enhancing the feel of a game. Like mechanics, there is a near unending amount like particle effects, screen shakes, pauses in frames, color, size and variety of objects. After watching a video on enhancing game feel I learnt that games like Street Fighter actually freeze the game for a fraction of a second when an attack contacts the other player to increase the feel of the impact. I found out that you can use the alpha is an image to create ripple effects on the scene and separate and alter the position of the color channels. These are things that I would like to learn and experiment over the holidays.

I decided to take the time of this project to learn and work on becoming a more effective team leader. Unfortunately I failed to be a decent leader (I may be being hard on myself), but I did learn how morality can significantly affect production and will need to take this into account during future projects as well as making sure that team members are not only skilled at their field but also enjoy the work/learning new things. This I find is the primary cause of why communication failed during the majority of this project.

After attending the exhibition I have noticed that I've become a lot more self confident and sociable, it has become easier to talk to people and pitch the games I have made or contributed to as well as their functions clearly and in a more natural manner.

Since completing Zurvivor I feel video games is one of the best forms of social interaction we have to date. I still like seeing it as a form of art medium but where as television shows and movies develop trust between the audience and characters video games, and games in general, also allow the trust to develop between the players themselves along with in game characters.

Close Out

As stressful as the final half of the trimester was I am happy with the way it all turned out and feel I have learnt a lot about myself and new skills. I have learnt a bit more about scripting as well as new techniques that will help me create more entertaining games including new animation techniques, creating emotion and ways of enhancing the feel.

Holiday Period

Over the holiday period I intend to use what I've learnt this trimester to work on my own personal projects as well as continue working on Virion to get it out on market asap. From what I've seen the games industry in Australia is primarily indie which is why I've been trying to increase my knowledge in scripting, as a designer I feel it is a part of the job description to have multiple skills, or wear many hats as they say. I am still unsure as to how to become an effective world builder but for online games but for now I think I will focus on getting into the industry. I know world building does not just focus on MMOs so I intend to work my way up from indie to AAA and finally create my own team dedicated to creating an immense MMO. I would like to do more research on the lives and work process of current designers of online games to get a better feel as to what I intend to be and the work that goes into building worlds which I will also do over the holiday period.

There is currently an App game I have been working on for a while now but it has been mostly concept work, so I will be making it my primary focus along with Virion over the next two months. I am unsure if I will be attending the Make A Thing this time or if I would use the time to do my own personal Make A Thing where I will focus on getting as much done on my personal project.

The final year is also upon us and so I will need to prepare myself for getting a job in the industry. This means I will need to update my portfolio, online profile and resume over the holiday as well, just so that I am fully prepared and not leaving anything to chance. I have already begun my own itch.io ccount nd may continue using that as my games porfolio, I also have an old art portfolio that I should update. I look forward to a busy holiday period and hope to learn a lot more before the beginning of the next trimester.

Itch.io page : http://rowan-patman.itch.io/