Week 4 - Gold Week Final Blog - Summary

Overview

- Completed all functionality for game

- Polished and Optimized code
- Presented game

Finally the project has come to an end... Kinda. We still have more to do if we want to consider it shipped unfortunately. Anyway for the most part it's looking good. We presented our game and the teachers seemed to have liked the work that we had done. They did however say that they thought it would be great for kids, however our target market was actually adults. I argued the same against my team, that adults wouldn't play our game from the beginning, so I suppose I was right! I guess we won't really know for certain until we get in on the market. 

I'm feeling ambivalent about how everyone performed. I know everyone on my team is skilled, it was more just a matter of motivation. I kind of expected that since it's a year one project, but that's why I stressed that we get our shit together. I wanted everyone to understand that having this game polished is one of the few things they will have to place on their portfolios by the time they finish. Fortunately everyone had their moments of hard work and the project didn't fall apart. It's roughly 80% finished, so there's a few more things to push it over the line (at least for my standard). I think the game has a lot more potential, however things would have to change and that would take time. I think it's best to just go on, fixed it up that little bit more and kiss it goodbye.

Hopefully everyone on the team learned a lot about themselves and the process of making a game. It can be a very stressful experience and it was also their first. I know I expected a lot from everyone, but I think I know how important it is that, if these people want to get into the industry, they need to put their best efforts into the work they do.

Week Three Blog - Presentation Week

Week overview

- Worked on Prototype

- Presented idea

This week we had to present our game and pitch it to 3 teachers. Our performance was apparently pretty good and we were given the green light. We're feeling pretty confident about our game now as it has been quite fleshed out. Hopefully if we stick to our plan, we can get the game finished and polished by the due date. There is however a big issue regarding making the game for multiple aspect ratios. Unfortunately that task in itself will take more time than anything else so we're leaving it as a polish feature.

The prototype has been coming along very slowly as I'm finding managing code architecture in Unity quite difficult. I was originally working a lot with delegates but this week I refactored the majority of my code base in attempt to 'un-spagettify' my code as I was having trouble backtracking all the delegates everywhere. Hopefully adding features in the future will be easier as a result of this.

Next week I'll just be focusing on the prototype as usual.

Week Two Blog - Getting Started.

Week overview

- Started on the prototype
- Discussed Game Design

So this week we basically started fleshing out our game idea a little further. We tried to determine who our target audience might be and what kind of art style would compliment the game mechanics and audience. Unfortunately due to our lack of market knowledge, we had trouble determining exactly who our audience would most likely be with the game at it's current state. We settled with something like young teen to adults in their 30's.

As for the Prototype, I basically just implemented the very basic functionality. Functionality such as the ability to draw the line and overlap the targets. The targets will turn green to indicate that they've been overlapped.

Next week we have to present. Looking forward to it.

Week One Blog - Pre-Production begins!

Week overview

- Scrapped previous game idea

- Decided on a new idea

This week has been quite eventful. We discarded our previous game idea that we had been working on before the actual project started and we're now running with a new one. The new idea has much better core game play and is far more simple than the previous idea which is great. Our new game is basically an agility based mobile game where the player has to slice through waves of objects. We still need to flesh out the idea a little more, but I think it's fundamentally sound and easy to build upon.

The group dynamic has been pretty good so far. It has been a little stressful trying to settle on an idea. Despite all having similar tastes, we struggled to come up ideas that we're interesting and relatively 'new' in terms of game play. Then we had to figure out if an interesting art style could be built upon that. I think if we had a more elaborate design process or maybe a more formal structure of management, we wouldn't have run into so many roadblocks.

For this project, my main concern is the project management. I think we can establish a polished product within the time we have, and I think there shouldn’t be anything too technically challenging for the team and I. What I do think will be a challenge is organizing our work so that we are working at a rate that allows us to complete our product. This means having weekly goals, all assets fully fleshed out conceptually, and a solution for tackling problems that may arise. I think as long as we can establish this system before we get our hands dirty, we’re golden. So basically I think this should be our priority for next week.

Hopefully we can make it happen.