Evaluation

Overall I have enjoyed this project and I felt like I have managed to create a good base for something I would like to take into the future, but I’m most happy about the knowledge I’ve received from doing this project as this will help me if I ever decided to pursue indie development as a career path as my decision on what I’m going to pursue later hasn’t been made. Looking back I have realised I need to defiantly manage my time better in the future, this is the one thing that has held me back on a lot of the units from creating to the extent that I would have liked. As well as this I thought if the order units were changed through the year slightly it would have given a better end result so that plans could be made to increase thematic links through the units resulting in a more complete and higher quality project.

Unit 72

This was the last unit in terms of our project and this one was lighting and rendering which I had already previously done in my level design, this meant I had to create a new scene to house my lighting in, to make sure I didn’t waste time creating this room I used a previous project I had worked last year that I didn’t have enough time to light and furnish properly. One of my biggest issues with the unit was the lack of time to be able to create my own assets for the room to be lit which was actually the key to creating the room without it the lighting couldn’t be properly implemented or tested which made me feel rushed. The end product I achieved in the time nether the less I was happy with. It contain all vital lights which I used in level and was edited to look nicer using a post process volume, due to the time constraints my room was more like a scene set up for the purpose of taking screenshots from one-half of the room because the rest was empty rather than a fully populated room this is something I would like to change given more time but still gave me good results in terms of my lighting, my favourite thing is the lights shining through the blinds I used 2 spotlights for this but looking back I would have used a directional light instead so that I could have created god rays through my window. Overall I enjoyed this unit but in terms of the project for me personally it felt unnecessary at this point since most of the level was completed and we had already began lighting, with the added fact that it had to be a furnished room this meant I couldn’t implement this into my level fully since mine was a completely natural outside environment and had nowhere to place a room to test lighting this made it feel just disconnect from the rest of my project, but still interesting to learn about lighting.

Unit 74

This unit took me by surprise initially since we had finished our character implementation and then had to create animation on our characters. I felt as though this could have been a more productive unit if set before the character implementation unit because we could then specialize and design our animation for use in the game instead it felt like I had already got everything needed in the previous unit. This meant that the animation I created were just for fun and challenge as opposed to the purpose of attaching them to my character in game, I was happy with the quality of the animation but just felt like they couldn’t be taken anywhere beyond this which made the unit feel disjointed and not a part of the umbrella brief which covers all the units for the year. If I got to do this again I would animate my character with the sole purpose of implementation and creating a unique feel and personality to my character which links in with one of my other problems which was the lack of opportunity to make an character which would fit in with the theme of the project as opposed to picking from a list of premade models.

Unit 79

For unit 79 I had to create a Stylized unit interface which will allow my level to be loaded in and the main menu to be navigated. This was the first unit that had an emphasis on theme and aesthetics as opposed to the more technical side, with this we had to include some kind of interaction with the background much like Hearthstone and other games. This allowed me to create a menu which matched the style of my level which helped to tie up a lot of my design, excluding the characters and animations which still stood out. I used this unit to again take a different route and challenge myself by not using widgets to create my menu I instead tried to make the menu 3D in my level this proved for to be a slight challenge since there were no real resources on how to do this so I had to learn it through nothing but experimentation. This helped me develop my techniques a lot but also hindered the speed of which I have created my menu assets this mean that challenging myself was part of the problem which made my menu not have half as much of the functionality to create a better menu, I felt slightly disappointed with my end product of this unit since I couldn’t finish the functionality but in terms of look I thought the menu fit well with my theme and looked nice. I enjoyed this unit as part of the bigger project since it wrapped everything up into a nice package and allowed us to be more creative one looks as opposed to functionality even if I think my functionality was lacking.

Unit 76

This was one of my favourite units since I got to develop key assets for my level design and world building, I put a lot of thought into the design of my level thematically since I didn’t want to do another ultra-realistic set of assets which I’m used to so I used this unit to challenge myself by going for a stylized look to my level this meant I was creating challenge for the rest of the year by stepping out my comfort zone to create a full project in this theme. This helped me broaden my toolsets so that I can have a higher array of tools to possibly attract an employer. I think this unit went extremely well and I achieved a really nice looking style for my island theme, the one complaint I would have is that due to spending most of my time on the landscape and creating the theme stopped me from fully reaching my potential in terms of assets which disappointed me but next time I will defiantly manage my time more effectively.

Unit 52

This is the first unit I’ve completed of the year and it was the implementation of a character into unreal, this covered the inclusion of both rigging and animating a character as well as creating a locomotion move set to allow control of the player blueprint and the implementation of animations.

I thought this unit went very well as I had completed most of the presentation slides giving instruction on what to include on my own character, I did run into a few complications which did push me back on my time plan for the unit like not fully understanding the code that makes the player transition between sword to great sword at set times in the animations. This caused me many troubles since my control wouldn’t work until this was fixed, and after all the trouble I had it was just a matter of changing 1 simple number, beyond this the work went uninterrupted. I didn’t like the fact that our characters where taken straight from mixamo I would of like to have created my own character and animation since it made the connection between my character and level feel disjointed but I am thankful for the knowledge this unit gave me and will be paramount in my game development in the future but thematically I felt as though the whole unit could be better.

Introduction

For this unit I have been tasked with evaluating my project for the year and all the units that have split the project focusing on key areas of design like level building and character development. When I evaluate my progress and work completed I must then do the same for the project as a whole as well as myself. This will help me in the future when I plan and develop a full project from start to finish.