How Successful Was Our Project?

Our project is now finally complete and has been uploaded to itch.io; for the past two weeks we have been working on the marketing of our game by promoting it on various sites such as Twitter and on Discord servers, this had lead to the game getting noticed by a few people. James has been working on this the most, he has set up our game on itch.io, and ensured that our roles during the project are displayed correctly on the page.

Overall our project has been a huge success, our game both works and is playable - we worked hard on production and were lucky to have multiple playtests which gave us a lot of feedback and advice to work with and implement into our game. The communication we had with players was crucial, particularly as our playtesters were within the age range of our target audience; it was important that we made the game fast paced and competitive to appeal to them and to the 'party game' theme which we hoped to achieve.

Reviewing both the Positives and Negatives of Production:

The pipeline which we had for creating our 3D assets was extremely successful and everyone worked hard to get the majority of them done. Looking back I was happy with the concept art I created, although I realised that I should have added a few notes to these - particularly for foliage which was based off the exotic plants. This would have made it easier for the modelers, James and Owen, to create these assets.

Making use of tiling textures could have also sped up production, it was not until further into the project where we began using these. I used a tiling texture to create the wood planks for the fence and docks, however didn't find any other use for tiling textures.

Although my original role at the start of production was both Texture Artist and Assistant Programmer, I wasn't able to texture as many assets as I had hoped - my primary role became a programmer. I spent the majority of my time texturing assets at the start of the project, this was due to unforeseen issues within the group which meant I couldn't get access to the game project despite asking for it, meaning I wasn't able to program

I started off the game project by working primarily as a Texture Artist, it was at this point when I got the majority of my texturing done. I sadly wasn't able to program until after December, this was due to unforeseen issues within the group which meant that I couldn't get access to the game project despite asking for it, meaning I wasn't able to fulfil this role. This was very frustrating as coding the mechanics was something that I wanted to be involved in and I enjoy, but couldn't start doing so until January.

During this time I worked on the Technical Design Document - my main goal whilst creating this was to create a document which outlines all of the necessary mechanics for our game, any pseudocode which would help us understand it, and flowcharts as a visual element. I listed key aspects of each mechanic, which made it easier to break down my code into steps when I came to make it.

During the project I spent a lot of time debugging previous code, which took up a lot of time, as well as implementing my own code. Overall I think that this part of the project went really well, I attempted to find the most optimised way of creating most mechanics, and got them completed in a good amount of time. There's still issues in the game, however these are minor details which shouldn't effect the gameplay.

Aspects of the game that I worked on:

Programming:

- Dash Mechanic

- Split Ball Mechanic

- Stamina Mechanic

- Sprint Mechanic

- Timer

- Overtime (Sudden Death)

- Barrier Position (Trigger Boxes)

- Implementing UI

- Ammo and Stamina UI

- Controller UI Scroll and Navigation

- Creating the Game Loop

- Player Hit Effects

- Bug Fixing

- Packaged game issues

- Fixing powerups

- Fixing barrier collision

Texturing:

- Plants (water reed, purple plant, orange plant)

- Cactus

- Tribal Pots (3)

- Dock

- Teepee

- Spears

- Wooden Fence

Pre-Production:

- Technical Design Document

- Games Design Document (Market Analysis)

- Concept Art

- Level Design

Our game on itch.io: