Project 10 – Evaluation

Introduction –

The brief for this project we were tasked with thinking about the audience experience of a game and how that can be replicated in a different format or platform”. I set out to make a demake of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in the style of Pokemon on the Gameboy.

Evaluation

I believe a strength of my game is the graphics. I believe the character sprites are true to the intended style of game, that being pokemon. I designed all of the sprites with a colour palette I selected from an actual gameboy screen, with all the non-black colours being some shade of green. I tried to implement this graphical style across the entire game and I believe I was successful in this, as all environments feature the graphical style and palette I wanted to include.

Another strength of my game is that it features a dialogue system that makes use of complex mechanics featured in the Construct engine. The dialogue mechanic made use of the array system from construct, to make a highly editable and versatile table that allows the player to have any words appear at any time.

A weakness of my production as a whole is that my game is unfinished and lacks quite a few elements. This is mainly due to the complicated way in which I went about designing the game, which meant that changing one thing would require me to change the same thing in 4 other layouts, with minor changes. This method was extremely inefficient and lead to multiple mishaps and things being out of place, or even missing entirely.

A weakness of the project itself is that I believe I was way too ambitious while designing my game. This, mixed with working on 2 large projects at the same time, lead to my game ending up unpolished and missing features, graphics and sound that I would have liked to implement. This an example of graphics I would have liked to implement would be the combat sprites, in the game currently, they are a black and purple square, these squares were supposed to be custom graphics of the 2 main characters of the mission, but I had to scrap this idea due to time constraints.

Reflection

Overall, I believe I could have done much better on this project if my game wasn’t as ambitious as it was. I did not fully realise the scope of the project and struggled to manage both P10 and P11 at the same time. If I had managed my time and effort better then I may have been able to create a polished version of my game that took some sacrifices in terms of length, mechanics or size to save time. A mechanic I included that I didn’t expect to be so difficult was the dialogue system, this mechanic ended up being the core of this project, as well as the most difficult part. The reason it was so difficult was because I had no idea how to implement it properly, as my first ideas fell through and ended up not working. I did find a solution that worked but was incredibly tedious, so instead of working on it that way I spent a few hours working on an array system, which meant I could display all text in the game on a table and have the code scroll through that, which surprisingly worked perfectly and allowed everything to be changed at will without editing the code. In the next project I believe I will not be too ambitious, so that I can make, finish and polish a game in time for the end date, which will be made easier due to the fact that we are not working on multiple projects at once.

Conclusion

The overall project was a lot more disappointing to me than I had hoped, as I wasn’t able to create what I initially set out to. If I knew how to implement certain mechanics easier, or if I didn’t have another project to work on, then maybe I would have been able to spend more time on other parts of the game to make it a more polished experience, as well as provide more work on my blog. Because of everything wrong with my game, I believe I failed in what I initially set out to do, and will correct this in the next, and last project.