Personal Review of First Project
Throughout the first project of this year I have contributed a number of different things to the game, I created the basic template for the characters and applied textures to two of them, creating the AI and the player character. This was a fairly familiar task due to similar requirements in a task in the previous games course which required assets to be made in a similar art style. Perhaps my biggest contribution to this project however was the creation of the basic engine that the rest of the game was built around, I created the movement script for the player, as-well as all the necessary features for a room changing script, and the doors to apply the transition. Alongside this I created a menu system to be used at the beginning of the game. This is also the first asset created and therefore set the style for the rest of the pieces we created.
Whilst the majority of this code has been left un-touched, in-place, the movement for the character was tweaked to use the less demanding glide function as opposed to steps to help with optimisation for the Pi. This was not the only piece of optimisation I was responsible for, paired with Zsolt, we managed to vastly improve performance so that the game became playable on the Pi, as opposed to the low frame-rate struggle we had previously. We did this by removing the vast majority of loops in the game and heavily reducing the checks made every frame by replacing any of them we could with broadcasts, such as in the hiding and note showing scripts, as-well as the various checks done in the player sprite.
I was also responsible for implementing many of the features suggested and bug-fixes found in the playability test which was given to a number of people. After giving it to a few people, I noticed that a lot of people had trouble entering doors if they clicked too many times in a panic for example, which I then fixed by changing the way the room variable is set from each door and when the character is stationary.
The playtest itself was designed as a group and we came up with a few key themes we wanted to test:
Can it break? The most important question – does the user manage to break the game in any way
Is it intuitive? Does the user understand how to play the game
Are they immersed in the game? If they aren’t interested in the game then we haven’t designed it properly
Do they feel good after completing a task? If they escpae the AI or complete a puzzle, do they feel they have achieved something, if not – why not
Is the learning curve ideal for both casual and hardcore gamers?
Does the AI treat the player fair? The AI needs to be hard to evade, but it needs to be fair, if the player can’t escape him then the game becomes pointless
The final thing I did during this project was installing the operating system on the Pi, this was a simple enough task and worked as expected, providing an interesting look into the basics of how the Pi itself works.
