Elden (Student Version) Post Mortem

Elden Reflective Practice Report

Studio 3 post mortem

Studio 3 has been an enjoyable unit, it was split into 2 separate projects. These projects were:

• East inland trading co. - was the first project for this trimester taking up 8 weeks which was a considerable amount of time more than the 2nd project. It’s a game where you control a land ship where you can fire a cannonball attached to a chain that can be reeled in by left-clicking your mouse repeatedly. You can deploy Fulton balloons that lift off pieces of land and are sold to give the player currency. After missions that currency can be used to purchase certain upgrades. You are handed a series of 3 envelopes that contain 3 different missions for each faction, those 3 factions were The Clergy, the Venetians and the colonial government. The missions force you to either destroy certain buildings and a certain quantity of them or steal certain kinds of land. It’s been a fair while since we worked on this project so I’m a little bit rusty on the details. But from what I remember not too much went right for project, but also not too much went wrong.

• Plantagonist was the 2nd and final Project for the trimester taking up a total of 5 weeks which was considerably less time than the first project. Plantagonist is a game where you play as a living sunflower that has dived into an ant hill after some mischievous ants have stolen your little sunflower seeds. The flower hangs upside down from its stem as if a long rope and the player uses a trackball mouse to swing from side to side by swinging the trackball and moving the base of the flower’s stem by left clicking and right. The objective of the game is to collect the seeds to gain score and avoid ants and aphids that deal damage to your character. There are also objects that weigh your character down once you collect them, making it more difficult to swing. The player constantly descends through the ant hill and is unable to return to the surface once the game commences.

East inland trading co

What went right?

• GUI – there was a lot of intensive planning for how the GUI for the game would work and a lot of the focus for the designers in our group was put into it. 3 of us focused on creating the artwork on the GUI and how it operated but there ended up being a lot of talk about how things are going with it.  Although it turned out very well it could have been time that we spent elsewhere that could have been more beneficial to the project.

• The mechanics- a fair few of the mechanics of the game were implemented and it provided a moderately fun experience. In the end we didn’t end up getting every mechanic planned into the game because we were continually coming up with more ideas when we really shouldn’t have been but was implemented was enough to make the game enjoyable.

What went wrong?

• Communication between programmers and designers-Unfortunately there was a bit of distance between the programmers and designers because we were working in a much larger group than we have previously during our studies. So this took a bit of time to get used to. The relationship we had for this project was that the designers provided the concepts and assets and implement them when really everyone should have chipped into putting the game together in the engine.

• Time management- Our time wasn’t managed very well throughout the project and it often left us a little confused as to what was required of us at certain points because of it. We were still implementing mechanics close to the deadline of the project meaning we essentially got very little polish into the game when it became time to submit, the game looked very good but there was almost no feedback.

Plantagonist

What went right?

• Communication improved- at the beginning of the project we were still a bit confused about how to operate as a large team but this straightened out early on and we were required to insure that whenever the designers had a meeting, a programmer had to be present to make sure that those ideas were viable in the time we have.

• GUI- similar to the previous project, a lot of focus was put into the GUI but thankfully not enough to set the game back too far. We planned out how the menu would function fairly early on so that we would have a clear idea of what is required of the menu both aesthetically and functionally and in the end GUI worked out exactly as expected

• Polish – The game had a lot more polish than the previous project and we were able to incorporate visual feedback for the vital things that feedback would be required for. For example, the main character colliding with something bad would convey that something bad happened through the use of certain particle effects and camera shakes.

What went wrong?

• No collisions with walls- one of the major annoyances of the game is that the main character could not collide with the wall. Unfortunately the programmers had other work to attend to and this left the designers unable to understand how the collisions worked through their coding. I’m not sure if this could have been prevented as we didn’t have much time at all, so we were pretty much unable to research how the code the programmers’ code functioned.

• Exhibition- a week before handing in the final product we were required to show off our game at a student exhibition, but unfortunately we had a few issues with that. There were slides from the opening cut scene missing, there was no feedback so players didn’t understand what was going on and the collision box for the main character was way too big.

Conclusion

In the end both projects had their benefits and issues and I learnt a lot about working in a larger group than 2-5 people. I think one of the major issues I had during this trimester was the fact that I had a few too many things going on that may have set me back further then I would have liked.  I had to balance Work, Study and my personal life all at once which definitely meant that some of my time that should have been dedicated to study was spent at work. Next trimester I plan to dedicate to my final trimester of study at  this college full time to make sure that I provide as much benefit to the team as I possibly can.

the Exhibition

This week we have been preparing our game to present at an exhibition where students from different disciplines from my university were required to exhibit our work. We spent a lot of time trying to ensure that our most recent project, “Plantagonist” was presentable.Unfortunately it wasn’t to say the least and I will explain why now:

• There was very little feedback in the game at all to let the player know what they were doing at all
• The only thing noticeable that relates to feedback in anyway is that when the player collides with an ant they lose a petal (the petals are essentially a unique way to convey player health)
• There were no collisions with walls meaning that players could swing their character straight through them, making the game a lot less challenging and fun
• We were missing a few scenes from our opening cutscene leaving the players a little bit confused about the story of the game, Luckily the game isn’t very story driven and is more of an arcade experience
• A lot of the items in the game didn’t do anything at that point leaving a lot of players confused
• The main thing that annoyed a lot of people was the hitbox for the main character was far too large and they would collide with things a quarter of the screen away from them

On a positive note, a few people complimented the artstyle of the game which made me happy because, I generally worked on the art side of the project but in the end it was upsetting that we couldn’t present the game in a more playable form. This was a little expected seeing that we had only been working on the project for 4 and a half weeks which isn’t a lot of time to create a fully-fledged game. This has been a good experience to let people test our game and give us feedback about the gameplay and art.

Plantagonist: Cutscene

This week I spent most of my time dedicated to our game Plantagonist by creating some still images forming a cutscene explaining the basic backstory behind our game. The art in these cutscenes were created using photoshop and a Wacom tablet but were made to appear as hand-drawn as possible. I mainly did this because I feel I have lost my touch with traditional art besides grey-lead pencil drawings over the last couple of years through the constant use of digital media to create my artworks. Essentially my group and I decided that it would be best to create art that will be able to convey the story without needing any narration or too much reading, as our general demographic is children. I tried my best to incorporate comedy into the slides to make them a bit more appealing for any older players. I’ll display the slides in order and I’ll let you see if you can understand the story I’m trying to portray:

Essentially it entails a sunflower and its seeds living happily on a hill, until the evil ants scheme a plan to kidnap the seeds and have the sunflower exchange its land to get them back. It becomes night and the ant’s plan kicks into speed as they steal the sunflower’s innocent offspring and take them to their ant hill. As the sun begins to rise the sunflower catches a glimpse of the ants dragging the seeds into their ant hill and prepares itself to bring its kids back with its trusty sack.

Plantagonist: Concept art

Luckily this week was a lot more organized then the previous week. Essentially, this week I spent a lot of time creating art assets for our game and organizing the progression from the menu through to the actual game which was actually a lot of fun to finally see how the game will function and mess around in the whiteboard room. Here is a flowchart of the simplest way we could allow the player to progress through the menus:

I think this is good opportunity to showcase some of my work and show how it was put together. Nearly all the concepts for our characters were conceived in the whiteboard room along with a lot of our other ideas; For example this is the original concept that we agreed on for the  adorable collectible seeds:

Which eventually became the artwork below through taking inspiration from a real sunflower seed and adding the sad little face that everyone fell in love with in the original whiteboard drawing. This is one of the simple artworks I created for the project because of the lack of detail needed to provide the charm it has

We handled the health of the main character in the game in a fairly unique way. The character is a sad little colourful sunflower that wants to collect its poor little seed babies that were kidnapped by the evil ants. The sunflower’s health is handled through the use of the amount of petals it has, when its petals reach zero the player loses the game. I definitely think this is a fun and unique way to portray the player’s health and is definitely much more interesting than a simple health bar.

The final artwork I’m going to show is the evil ants that have kidnapped your seed babies and how they are portrayed. To save on time we thought it would be fun to make the ants a bunch of evil little stick puppets that sit on an ice cream stick and bob up and down to provide some sense of motion. They were given a jagged white outline to make it seem that the character is actually made out of paper. This fits into the game as the entire aesthetic of the menus in the game are made to seem like a children’s storybook. My group and I are very happy with the art-style of the game and it makes the game ever so slightly more enjoyable.

The pitch

This week was another hectic one. We were asked to pitch our game to a lecturer from another class that had no knowledge about the work we had done previously to see if the game makes sense and sounds fun. He was fairly happy with the idea and gave us some feedback on the programming side and some possible issues that may arise during the creation of the game and we began developing the game. While I was minding my own business and creating some concept art for the characters in the game I was dragged into a room to talk about what assets would be required for the game which makes sense, but eventually new ideas and concepts for levels were being added to the list even though we obviously didn’t have enough time.

It was obvious that not everyone in the group was on the same page. Our lecturer rounded everyone up to make sure that we were confident that we would be able to complete the project by the deadline and enforced that we only keep the features that we initially pitched which was an arcade experience consisting of one level that could be played in multiple ways to obtain a higher score. Eventually we came up with a pretty terrible pun as the name for our game: “Plantagonist”. This experience definitely taught me that we should get the idea solidified early in the project to prevent issues from arising later on, when we don’t have enough time to sort them out.