Evaluation fmp

Evaluation - FMPBen White

1. Technical quality of the final product

Overall, I believe my section of the game has turned out quite well and it was a lot better than I had expected. The vast majority of my in-game elements were created using the game maker engine. This includes sprites, programming and backgrounds. I mainly focused on programming my game. This is because I enjoy programming and would like to have a career based on programming for computers, so I tried to implement as many ideas and features as I could and I believe that I have indeed added quite a lot to my section of the game.

Some images were gathered from clipart


Programming

To create my game, I initially followed a set of tutorials which would teach me the basics of programming for a 2D game. I was taught things such as setting gravity, movement, AI, object interaction, setting objects states and so forth. These tutorials were very useful, as once complete, I was able to expand on these original ideas and compose my own game from them.

To begin with, I had a very simple game (which can be seen at the link underneath this presentation) that had elements such as simple AI, basic player movement and an attack and collision. Over the course of the project, I have tried to expand on these simple objects by programming new ones and improving old versions.

In the end, I have added and improved many pieces of code. The player now has been given 4 separate attacks. I originally planned for 4 attacks as this would give the player a decent choice as to which to use, and it wouldn’t be too many to remember. Each attack has been made to perform differently so that the player can try to use some skill when faced with a singular or group of enemies. When the player presses the appropriate button, the game then changes the players ‘state’ (which basically means he will stop following his movement script and follow the script designated to that button) and he performs an attack animation, in which a projectile is fired on a specific frame. The player then reverts to his movement state at the end of the animation.

As well as this, I have also added the ability for the player to swim. This script works when the player collides with the water object as this then tells the game to switch the players ‘state’ so that he uses a swimming script I have created. Above the water, there are invisible collision boxes that operate when the player leaves the water. This tells the game to revert the player into his normal, moving state and tells gravity to come back into effect so that he doesn’t fly off.



Programming – Continued…

As for the games HUD (Heads-Up-Display), I have added a life bar meter, coin counter and a bar displaying player attacks and buttons. The attacks buttons change sprite when the corresponding button is pressed, to tell the player that this attack is being used. The coin counter is set to record the amount of coins the player has come into contact with in the field and picked up. It is reset when the player has gathered 10 as well as restore 10 health points to the player. The life bar was more complicated and I had to look at a tutorial for this section. It works by repeating two sprites (The black outline and filled-in red section) 20 times onto two lines. The red section displays according to the players current HP, so say the player takes 10 points of damage, the bar is coded so that the game removes 10 red hearts from the front, but leaves the outlines, to display that the player only now has 10 points of health left. All of these elements are coded to follow and stick to the camera, which is following the player.

For the AI, this was far more difficult to code for, but I managed to give them collision/box detection and states. The detection for the AI has been improved so that when the AI finds a hole in the ground, or finds that a block is in front of it, the enemy will jump over what is in front of it in an attempt to continue pursuing the player. The sword and spear enemy now also have two separate states, a moving state and an attack state. The moving state is activated when they are at a distance to the player. When they are close enough to attack the player, the attack state is activated in which they will swing their sword/spear. This creates an invisible box on a specific frame that damages the player and it covers the area where the weapon is swung. This box disappears after a frame

Overall, I believe the majority of coding elements for my game have been created quite well. They mostly always work as intended and there are very few glitches. A few glitches that can be noticeable are in the player collision and the AI. When the player jumps into a ceiling, wall or similar other object, he stops completely. I originally wanted him to slide with the object and as it currently is, it can cause a few problems with the platforming. Also, the AI can be a bit strange too. Sometimes when they are attacked, they will continuously slide to the left or stop completely. There were some strange glitches I was unfortunately unable to fix.



Graphics (Sprites/Backgrounds/Fonts)

For my game, I planned from the start for it to have a very simple, colourful and blocky style that would be cartoony. I believe that I have achieved my original intentions. I wanted my sprites/backgrounds to look like this as I wanted to focus mostly on the programming, as I am better at that than the artistic side. Despite this, I have been able to create a large quantity of sprites, some with a great amount of detail like the final boss which I am quite proud of. I have learnt from this that I can be quite good at sprites when I put my mind to it, however, there is still much to learn.



Graphics (Sprites/Backgrounds/Fonts) – Continued…

One big inspiration for the artistic design of my game was Minecraft. Many of my sprites have been influenced by this game such as the platform tiles. For example, in the stone block texture I have created on the right, I used the stones blocks in Minecraft for reference to details and specific shading elements.

Overall, I am quite happy with my art style as it is not too complex. This allows for more time to be allocated to more important things such as programming the engine and working objects. One problem I face was animation. I like the animation is which I have done, but for some, I believe they look too unusual and blocky, but this had to be done due to the pixel-like art style.



Footage, sound and editing

To gather the footage for my game, I used a piece of software called Cam studio. It works by recording the window that you have selected and many video options can be changed. I set the quality to 80 so that the video file would not be too large. The recorder handled quite well and I was able to quickly use and apply it to my game.

The editing software, Game maker, was the greatest tool I used and ensured that my game could be developed. This piece of software contains many utilities that I could use to be able to develop the various aspects of my game. It uses its own coding language that I have found to be quite simple and it also uses a handy drag-and-drop system to help new programmers. Sprite art development was also very easy to learn as it provides you with a decent set of simple tools and layout for you to learn and master. These combined, I was able to make a lot of content for my game. I could easily measure the room system to plan and create the intended level, develop early sprites to test the room and then move onto more complex ones and then use the simple coding system to learn how to code and then move onto the more complex system which allowed for move flexibility. These all allowed me to develop the final product I have today.

A final piece of software I used was the Reaper sound editing software. I used this only to manipulate sounds for my game. I had used previous recordings and developed sounds such as fire or shooting noises, however, I am not very good at sound development, so decided to focus on the other things I am good at like the programming. This meant that my game would barely have any sound, but I left a few clips programmed in to show to examiners that I am able to do it.



Overall Gameplay and glitches

I think that the overall gameplay of my game feels quite nice. Each system works correctly and the player is able to choose from a pool of attacks to deal with enemies. Running and jumping work well with a few glitches depending one where you land, for instance, jumping right on the side of a moving platform can cause the player to become stuck for a few seconds until they drop. These can be mostly rare occurrences though and the level can easily be quickly restarted if something goes wrong. The mechanics of the game work well despite this and the player is able to collide with every object I need him to, in the way I want him to. One final glitch I have noticed is that when the player has more that 10HP and collects 10 coins so that their HP increases, for a split frame, the red hearts section of the life bar expands out of bounds across the screen, before reverting back to where it should be. This is only a minor visual glitch and will not affect overall gameplay, so I decided it would be best not to spend time trying to fix it as there was not much time left near the end.


2. Production skills

Over the course of the project, I have learnt many valuable skills when it comes to Game maker development. Thanks to Game makers many features that are simple to learn, I was able to develop lots of elements for my game.



Programming – States

A major thing I have learnt whilst on this project is the use of states when coding. Adding states allows the object (most commonly the player) to completely change what it is doing. For example, I have learnt how to change my player state so that he can be defeated and fall over. The game constantly checks the players HP and when it gets to <=0, the player object is told to change state. I have learnt that this means that he will now follow a very different script which I have written up which tells him to change to his death sprite, fall over and cancel any movement.

States are very useful to learn as they contain many useful possibilities. I could use states for AI, bosses, breaking objects, running and so forth.



Programming – Movements and gravity

Another very useful thing I have learnt is how to get an object to move when it is told to, and follow the rules of gravity. This is useful to know as now for future reference, I will be able to code player objects or even events for the AI. On top of this, I can now code the objects to change sprites and change speed depending on which button is being pressed and this opens up more ideas for the future.



Graphics – Sprite development

Graphics-wise, I have learnt many ways to develop sprites. These extras include shading, depth, use of colour and detail. I have watched many video online explaining how to combine various pixels to produce very detailed and nice looking images and this will be very useful for my future as I now know how to develop strong sprites. My development on this still needs to be improved on many areas, but I am very happy with what I have accomplished so far. Some examples can be seen on the right



Graphics – Animation development

Another very important thing I learnt about the sprites is how to animate them, as well as various techniques to do so. At the start, I didn’t think I would be able to do any animation as I thought it would not look good, but as I watched different techniques on videos, I learnt how I could use them in my own game and develop some quite nice animations. My favourite animation is probably the death animation as it looks very fluent.

To develop these animations, you must first create an initial sprite. I then found out that you could create multiple frames and move/recreate each frame very slightly different to the last. Doing this would result in a quick animation that repeats. To set the animation to play at a certain speed, you must use the code ‘image_speed = x’, usually in the step event of an object. If x=1, the animation will play at a normal rate, but if x=0.5, it will play at half that speed. This was very useful to know as without it, all my animation would be really quick.



Pitch – Communication

In this project, I was asked to perform a pitch with my group. Usually, I am quite shy and therefore believed I would not be able to say much, but when I was in the pitch, I found out that I was able to speak much more than initially thought. At the end of the pitch, I also believed that my communication skills have also been improved.


3. Original intentions

Our original intentions

In our initial proposal for the game, we firstly stated that we wanted the final game to be a combination of various game styles. These would all be combined together, following the same story. We planned to have a hub world that connected each game and allowed the player to make a choice as the what they wanted to play.

We wanted to showcase our ideas and skills using these games, as we all had different ideas as to what game we wanted to make. We had in mind and RPG style game, horror game, platformer, runner and fighter game.

We aimed to use a lot of different software's to develop our game. These were Photoshop, game maker, reaper and RPG maker. Game maker would be our main engine which everything would run off, but we could use these additional programs for sound and art.

Images were gathered from clipart

3. Original intentions

How they matched

In the end, we stuck to the majority of our original idea. We have 4 different games in total, all connected in one game maker executable file. Unfortunately however, we had to end production on the hub world which was also the RPG game as we were very short on time and producing the rest of the game was proving time-costly. Besides this, we still managed to make the platformers, horror, runner and fighter game and I believe these turned out really well.

For my game, I used only Game maker and reaper. Game maker proved to be a brilliant tool which had enough utilities for me to safely and easily create my game. Reaper was also slightly used to produce sound by the group, and my group members also used Photoshop a lot in order to produces scenes and backgrounds.

Overall, I believe that my team stuck with our original intentions well. There could be improvements, and I believe we planned too much work, but we managed to create 4/5 games for our main product which is really good and we used most of the range of software's we described.


4. Time Management

Time Management

I believe that our group managed our time mostly well. In the end, we were able to complete all of our tasks, as well as our game and we were able to update our blogger in time too, but we nearly ran out of time as we had planned too much. There was a LOT to do in the final couple of weeks and we had to work really quite hard to ensure everything was evidenced and complete. We achieved this in the final week.

For the schedule, we frequently had to change our initial plan too. This can be seen a lot in the pre-production and production stages as we had to extend a lot of the process due to having planned too much. This is because we believed that our games would not be very complex and not take that long to program and create. I thought that my game would take a while however, but at the start of production, I quickly began to see that my own final game product would take me a while. If I were to do this project again, I would be sure to plan out more carefully what I want to do, as now I know how long it takes to make a game such as my plat former.


5. Target Audience

Target Audience

The target audience was mainly targeted at male and female teenager and adult demographics, but mainly the teenager. This is because many of our ideas followed old-style 2D games like Zelda or Mario which the adult and teenager range will remember greatly.

As for the feedback, we asked a number teenagers around our own age what they thought was good and bad about our full game after playing it all. Firstly, it was nice to know that everyone quite liked the art style of out games. We tried to stick to a similar cartoony style that wasn’t too detailed. They also liked how our in-game mechanics mostly worked well and worked to their intended purpose. They had also picked up on that a lot of time and work has gone into the project and that the initial concept was new and hasn’t been done before.

There were also a few bad points and improvements to be made of course. One that kept recurring was that some of our games were not very clear in terms of instructions and how to play them. They said that they were not quite sure what certain elements of the game did. To improve and fix this, we will need to ensure that each game has its own instructions screen, with detailed information as to which buttons work and what they do. They also stated that the story was not very clear. In the beginning, we did originally plan to implement a story, however, we did not as planning one and creating various screens and images would take up a lot of time, so we decided it would be best to go for a simple game where your task is to save your sister from an evil boss. To improve this in the future, we would dedicate more time to properly planning out a story and making sure each scene would be creatable.


6. Summary

Over, I believe that I have done quite well in my version of the game. It has a lot of content and is quite a lot for the time provided. I like the final game and its concept of combining different games is quite nice to experience, however, I believe that we planned too much work. In the final few weeks, it was very tough to ensure that the entire game was fully completed and that blogger was fully updated. There were many unforeseen problems in our final game that I had to fix and it is fortunate we were able to finish on time.

If I were to redo this project again, I would ensure that we create a simpler game. Each game combined in this final piece would be of similar size too as in our final game, there was one really big game and the rest were really short. I would also try to create only maybe 2 or 3 different genres of games to combine as any more can be too complex for the user as they will have to learn lots of different controls. Also, the story would be focused on more as the feedback suggested it would be a better game if it had a proper story and it made sense. To improve next time, our group would spend more time planning out a good story, as well as ensuring that specific cut scene images could be created on-time and that the story would still make sense when we combine everybody's games together.

Spiritual

Evaluation fmp