#chesspearson

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FEEDBACK (Self Reflection)

 Name: Chess Pearson                Age: 19

Our game was unplayable, so instead of getting peer feedback, I reflected the game myself in order to work out where I needed to go! 

 Rate the level design from 1 to 5.

1 being poor, 5 fantastic and say why? 2- It’s not that poor in that we don’t have a good concept and good design plans, it’s just the execution at this point is a long way from being at the 5 area. The Nav Mesh is broken at the moment so we are unable to move her, thus not able to showcase the rest of the level. Which incidentally, looks pretty good (albeit rough) thanks to Grace.

What were the 3 best areas? One of the best areas is the 2nd floor, the camera angles, lighting and objects in scene are more detailed and engaging that that or the starting level or bottom level. This is because the starting area is meant to engage you, but force you to move on. The second level is your chance to explore, with a collectable and lots of objects to interact with. The third level then leads on the second best area which is the street view. 

The street view is a nice open shot, that leads the eye to the alley way, the street is littered with books and a bin lies on its side, evidence of the chaos that Rosa missed out on. It may not be the most engaging of places, but for design and story reasons I think that it is one of the best areas. Then we have the alley way, the camera angles are by far the most extreme here, I like them as it gives a claustrophobic type of atmosphere and makes the game feel darker. I do still need to fix a couple of glitches that the cameras have (mainly about the placement of the trigger boxes.)

 What were the 3 worst areas? The coding aspect, this is all down to me as my health is not at the best, and my progress is slow. This explains the weakest area, being the Nav Mesh. However, this is not just on part of the scripting, this is partly to do with the level being too big. Once resized she ran a lot better. She cannot teleport either, so that is a major issue that needs to be rectified.  The second weakest would be the story element of the game, as I’ve not had chance to put in the GUI subtitles, it means that there lacks a narrative to the game that isn’t otherwise evident completely. The third would be atmosphere, both the environment artist and I need our own bits fixing, I need to add audio into the game in order to give the game some kind of atmosphere, it will give it a little bit more life. My Environment Artist needs to add lighting into the game to give it a deteriorating look, going from sunset colours to dark and rich purples.

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Chess here, with more work to help Grace (the Environment artist) out with. She needed Graffiti to be placed on the walls of the lower level of the library. So I got an image off of the moodboard we used and then tried different colours/textures to create something that matched out art style, but also could stand out enough to be seen.  I personally like the firs one the best, as it incorporates all three main colours of our characters.  Wolf (blue/purple) Rosa (Pink/Red) and Hunter-the man behind it all (Yellow/Gold). These colours work well together and are striking when made into graffiti. 

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More Models that I (Chess) created to fit into the game. The first is a plain notebook, jotted around tables by music students who were going to take notes from Wolf’s talk and get his signature with. 

And then there are both doors to the Librarian’s office, and to the outside of the library itself. I wanted the office door to have a more ornate feel to it, the classic door handle and design of panelling make it look less modern that the push door that I had for the outside-shows how the building is a mix of elements.

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Chess here, with some very simple models of objects that are scattered around and belong in the level. For example, bags that people have lost in the panic, Wolf’s Laptop and a Bin that lies on it’s side just outside of the library-pushed over as people rushed out of the front doors. I modelled these to help my Environment Artist -Grace, out. She and I worked effectively and closely together in order to make sure that we had good pacing of work. I made these in order to let her focus on the texturing of assets already featuring in the game.

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Chess here: I built a Powerpoint for us to present our game idea to our course leaders/acting producers.  This featured work by all of us to show off the concept of what our game would be like and what themes would be featured. 

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As Games Designer and Coder I have to make sure the Character Artist’s model works in Unity. The picture on the left is the not textured model, shown with a head that is broken. However, disregarding this superficial problem the model ran around with no issues and the rigging was correct.  After talking to my Character Artist, he managed to give me the textured model with the head issue rectified, and inside the game she ran around beautifully. I found that the cameras were not being called at first, but I managed to fix the problem by fiddling around with the Base Offset of the Nav Mesh Agent attached to her, and merging her with the capsule that worked. It is by no means the best way to fix this bug, but with little time left I wanted to get the rest of the game working as best as I could.  I will attend to this issue once I’ve got the majority of the game is sorted-the priority is getting everything in. 

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Games Designer here, with an updated schedule- we have until 4:00pm today then times up!  

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Working on the Camera Angles in the level, print screening them and saving them in a separate document is useful reference for me as I can then refer back to them once I start putting the cameras into the game.   These may not be the final angles used, but this process is good for the initial stages of the game.