SWOT Analysis

What is a SWOT Analysis?
SWOT itself stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities. It is a strategic planning and management technique to help a person or a company identify their strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that are relate to the companies competition or project planning.

Proposal Form

What is a Proposal Form?
A Proposal Form is a 2-5 page document answers key questions surrounding a major project. The usually include start and end dates, objectives and goals, requirements, a description of the proposed solution. These help the organise the initial project planning framework.

Context and Research

Having necessary research and a research plan is essential when starting a project since it establishes and helps define the purpose, goals, and technique, as well as defining the research project from beginning to end. Doing research before starting your projects helps you keep yourself organised, which has been a problem in some of my previous projects.

Through my own experience, I can say that doing detailed research and planning is crucial to achieving a successful project. Poor planning has caused me to completely redo one of my previous projects soon before it was due, and because of that, I wasn’t able to complete the project to my best ability.
For this project I want to carefully plan and research what I need to, so I can achieve something I’m proud of. I’ll do this by making a research plan and setting myself schedules, so I do everything I need to do and get it done on time.

For my FMP I will be creating environment art from a section of the game idea I have. I had two options for this project: environment art and game mechanics. I chose to do environment art instead of game mechanics since at college we’ve had more time learning to do environment art due to the fact both our lecturers both preferred and had more experience in environment art. I also do just prefer the freedom you get for it, compared to doing game mechanics, you must get it right, or the mechanic just won’t work.

By doing this project, I hope to improve my modelling, UV-mapping and texturing skills. I find the pre-production stage (gathering information and organising a plans) boring and time consuming, and therefore have previously skipped or/ poorly completed this part, which evidently made my projects unplayable. Therefore, I hope this project also helps me get better gathering more detailed information and organising plans, since this is one of the most crucial parts of making a game successful.

Research plan

Walking Simulation

Walking simulators is an emerging genre of video games, that are heavily narrative-driven experience with minimal gameplay. These games usually have a horror or mystery element to them, which tend to instill a sense of distance and loneliness in the player, games that successfully do this are the best types of walking sims. Walking sims tend to look pretty and the sound is usually competent or occasionally phenomenal. So the focus of these games are usually mainly on the story, however walking sims aren't just trying to tell a story, they're also trying to make the player feel something. Although most walking sims are as long as an average movie, at the end of the game you're usually only left with a short story. For example, the film Gone Home. Katie returns home to her family's house at the start of the game to find it abandoned. She then investigates the house and gathers her sister's journal notes in order to have a better picture of what happened to her family. The journal notes may take a couple of hours to locate, but you could easily go through them all in five minutes. There's also some environmental storytelling. Katie's father, for example, makes a livelihood writing review for electronics but also writes a novel in his spare time. There's also some disturbing information, such as her mother's possible romantic involvement with someone from work and her father's abuse as a child. Gone Home is a brief and sweet love story centered on Katie's sister. In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, you travel through an abandoned English town and listen to fragments of normal life before the rapture. This takes hours due to the game's extraordinarily slow speed, but if you sum all of the talks together, it shouldn't take much more than 10 to 15 minutes, if that. It's not fair to claim that walking simulators don't strive to convey a story, but I believe it's safe to say it's not the primary purpose. Walking simulators attempt to make you think and feel, which is a very tough thing to achieve in a predictable manner. Graphics are somewhat more objective than gameplay, which is considered to be more objective than narrative. All of this pales in contrast to how a game makes the player feel, which is unquestionably the least measurable aspect of the overall experience. It takes much more than a great story with a tragic ending to elicit powerful emotions from a player.

My Game Idea

The game is going to be a first-person walking simulation. My game will be more focused on the environment art. I want the game to have a low poly/minimalist/stylised art style. The end goal is to tell the story of the mans childhood and how he now sees how his childhood looked a lot better than how he remembered it. His story is that his family was not financially stable and couldn't give him the same things that his friends at school had. due to this he ran away at 16 and lived his life independently for 20 years. After living 20 years by himself in a successful job, he realises he's unhappy and has nothing to live for since he was so money orientated. He has no family, girlfriend, or friends. He decides to go back and visit his family, but when he arrives at the town he discovers the town to be extremely unpopulated. he walks through the streets of his town in an attempt to find someone still living there, and whilst walking through, memories get triggered. through these memories, he realises that his family did all they could to give him the perfect childhood and that the younger him was just unaware of their efforts. Right at the end, he finds this old lady right outside his childhood house.

I want my game to be set in a European village. I decided to choose this theme because I really like the way these places look. I love the architecture of old houses and how the villages are laid out. Small narrow roads and cute cafes. I love how the roads have brick patterns, and how they have colourful wooden shutters. Some other places have colourful buildings. I just really wanted to recreate these types of places in my level.

To the left are some pictures I took on holiday that have the same look that I'm going for.

Mind Map

What is a Mind Map?
A Mind Map is a technique used to put down information and ideas that show how different facts and ideas relate. It helps you organise your thoughts whilst enhancing your idea and creativity. Mind Maps makes it easier to display your ideas in an organised format and makes complex ideas easier to understand. This will be important during the production stage, as i will be reminded on exactly what i need to do and i wont get side tracked with other ideas.

Mood Board

What is a Mood Board?
A Mood Board is a type of visual presentation containing a series of images and sometimes text. Mood Boards are important because they help keep the style and aesthetic of a project consistent. Mood Boards allows you to collect thoughts, ideas, colour schemes and moods into one place and helps you keep that same/original idea. This mood board will be useful in the production stage because I often drift away from my original idea so this will help me keep on track.

Location Research

Why is it necessary to do research on where I am setting my level? Doing research on the location of where I am setting my level is important because it will allow me to get a deeper understanding of their culture. Therefore, it allows me to create a level that fits the intended location and that is also culturally aware. Cultural awareness is extremely important when creating a game in a location that I'm not fully knowledgeable about, this is because if I make something that isn't culturally appropriate this could cause many issues and may offend certain people. Another reason why location research is important prior to creating my game is so that my level fits with the intended theme. This means doing research on what a European village should look like. Researching my levels location theme will help me make a culturally appropriate game because I will be more informed on what a European village should look like.

The mystery behind the colours of European houses
Southern Europe has a Mediterranean climate, with warm to hot, dry summers and cool to moderate winters, as well as plenty of sunshine. The climate of Central and Eastern Europe is described as Continental, with moderate to hot summers and chilly winters. Because of these hot summers, many houses in southern Europe use bright coloured paint for the outside of their houses because the heat of the sun reflects better on brightly coloured paints. This helps keep the interior of the houses nice and cool. Another reason why many houses are colourful is that very many years ago fishermen would paint their houses a unique colour so that they'd be able to identify their house from very far away when they were fishing.

The unique streets of Lisbon, Portugal
The tiles, also known as Portuguese pavement or calcada portuguesa, are comes in a multitude of mosaic designs. They're still meticulously set down by hand, using a method developed hundreds of years ago. These tiles are in an astounding range of beautiful designs all across downtown Lisbon's streets.

Art Style Research

Doing research on the art style I want to use for my level will be important when creating my models and my textures. This is because I will gain a clearer idea of how to successfully make my game in that art style. The art style I will be choosing for my game is low poly. I've decided to choose low poly as my art style because I like how it can look very aesthetically pleasing.

What is low poly art style?

Low poly art style references the number of polys in a model. So, low poly models contain a small number of polygons in a model compared to high poly models which contain many polygons.

Advantages to choosing low poly art style

Low poly games aren't usually that demanding compared to other games which have hyper-realistic art styles. Because of this, it allows a wider range of people to play the game as they won't need high-end computers to be able to smoothly run the game. Because the game is less demanding and smoother to run than others, it allows developers to create a larger map.
Choosing a low poly art style for walking simulators is a great choice since low poly assets are much faster to create than high poly assets. It's also much more simple to texture since low poly isn't meant to be hyperrealistic. Because of this, it means developers can spend more time on storytelling since a major part of walking simulators is the story itself and not necessarily the game art. Although game art is very important, many indie game developers get caught up in trying to make the visuals beautiful and less time telling the story.
Another reason to choose a low poly art style is the simple fact the game doesn't age. Art styles that are not trying to be as realistic as possible, don't quickly start to look outdated because technology evolves and games progressively get more realistic with each passing year.

Game Review

I decided that it would be a good idea to personally play a successful walking simulator to gain in-depth knowledge of what a good walking simulator should look like. The game I decided to pick was "That Dragon, Cancer". I decided to choose this game since it was in a low poly art style and because the story was an emotional story about a family. That Dragon, Cancer uses a mix of first-person and third-person, and point-and-click interactions to retell the story of Joel Green's fight against cancer. The game is around 2 hours long like many other walking simulators, that discover the themes of faith, hope, and love.

My main objective in playing this game was to see how they successfully touched the hearts of many players whilst using a low poly art style. I found that models don't have to be extraordinary to make walking simulators successful, in fact, I learned that the models played a very small part of the whole game environment. Simple things like the lighting and the solid colour on the models made a significant impact on how the environment made the player feel. On one occasion every step the player took the lighting would change from a cold blue to a warm orange. I think the point of this was to show how unstable their emotions were. One minute they're a happy family laughing and playing around and the next minute they have bad news about Joel's cancer. The colours of the cards in the hospital that were directed to people who had lost their fights were all in a variety of solid bright colours. I think the bright colours were to show how beautiful the love towards these people was. In contrast, the cancer was modeled in an uncomfortable way and they were solid black. I think the purpose of how they modeled it was to cause some sort of anxiety and make the game environment unsettling, I think this also applies to how they made it solid black. The colour black represents death, darkness, and evilness, because of this it can make the game environment depressing and sad. Their use of colour and lighting was so well done, it added so much to the environment and was able to display so many different emotions.

Aside from environmental art, they also cleverly used sound to create emotion in the game. One example that really helped the player experience exactly what the father would be going through is the loud annoying crying Joel was doing. During this part, I really wanted the crying to end because it was loud and it just kept going, and it was ultimately really stressing me out. This made me realise this was exactly what his father must have felt, stressed and wanting it all to end. Another example of how they used sound to create emotion and show how the characters might be feeling is when Joel's mum, dad, and two doctors are in a room discussing the bad news about Joel's cancer being uncurable. During this moment the room starts to rain and flood, and Joel can be seen by himself in a small wooden boat. The chatting begins to echo and quieten down as the rain gets louder and a thunderstorm starts. I think this was supposed to represent Joel's point of view and how he might be feeling. It's showing that Joel's going through this scary journey alone and that all these meetings and discussions don't mean anything to him. This really makes the player get a sense of what Joel might be feeling.

Playing this game helped me to understand the importance of small details, and that models are not the only thing that makes a successful environment. This research will help me during the production stage, as it will remind me that I need more than models to make a game environment successful. This will help remind me to make sure I make good use of lighting, colour, ambient noise, music, and much more.

Target Audience

Identifying my target audience before starting my project will be important as I'll need to know that I'm creating the right content for the right people. Successfully identifying your target audience is crucial to making a successful game. In an attempt to find who my target audience is, I carried out primary and secondary research. For my primary research, I made a survey on Microsoft Forms. When writing down the possible questions I should ask, I kept in mind that I should have an equal amount of closed and open ended questions. It was important that I asked both these types of questions as they each gather either quantitative or qualitative data. Quantitative data is data that represents a certain number, amount, or range. Collecting quantitative data is good because it gathers a larger amount of information as it's usually a simple question to answer, it's easier to generalise data, and the questions are usually straight to the point. However, because these questions are answered with one word or number, it ignores the audience's opinion and any context behind their answer, which could lead to misinformation. Qualitative data is the complete opposite of quantitative data, it is non-numerical data. Qualitative data is important to collect because it gathers in-depth information, and it collects the audience's answer and the reason behind it. Some people, however, may skip these types of questions on surveys because it takes more time to answer. Collecting both types of data on my survey is important because it will ensure that the limitations of one type of data are balanced by the strengths of the other.

Primary Research

The first question I asked was "What type of games do you enjoy playing", which was also a multiple-choice question. The purpose of asking this question was to find out what types of games the people who were taking my survey enjoyed. playing. This Information also helped me see other games they enjoyed that also enjoyed simulation games. This is important as my game will be a walking simulation game and finding a trend between what other games people who enjoy simulation games play would help me during the pre-production and production stage of my game. It would help me during these stages as I would be able to follow a similar direction through my creativity as some of the other enjoyed games. When looking at the answers, I found that people who enjoyed simulation games also enjoyed adventure games.
The second question I asked was what they mostly played on. I asked this question because I wanted to have a clearer idea of what type of specs they would be running their games on. The reason why this is an important question to ask is that people who play on computers will have a very different experience playing certain games due to how good their computers are compared to people who play on consoles, like Xbox or PlayStation, will have the exact same specs. So everyone that plays on let's say a PlayStation 4 will have a very similar experience to some else whos playing on the same exact console. Looking back on this survey, I realise that I should have asked if they know, what type of specs people who play mostly on computers have. This would have given me more information on what sort of games would run smoothly on their computers. This question would help me understand and create a game that would run smoothly on my target audience's preferred technology to play on. Successfully doing so would give the player a better experience when playing my game.
The third and fourth question I asked was whether they had played and enjoyed a walking simulation game. 12 out of 22 said they had played a walking simulation and 10 of the 12 had said that they did enjoy playing it. This question made me realise that walking sims are not that popular but the people who have played them have enjoyed them. Again looking back at these questions I wish I had asked a couple of other follow-up questions like what walking sim did you play, why did you like or dislike the game, and if you haven't played one, why not. This would have allowed me to get qualitative data, which would have given me a more in-depth understanding to why people don't choose to play walking sims and what they liked and disliked about them. This information would have helped me because then I would have known what to avoid and what to make sure I include in my game when creating it.
Another thing I wanted to know was what art styles were most and least popular. I did this by giving the audience a range of art styles to choose from in a multiple-choice question. My aim wasn't only to see what was most and least popular, it was also to see if I could find any connection between people who enjoy playing walking simulation games and people who also like low-poly and stylised art styles. I found that 8/10 people who said they enjoyed playing walking simulators also liked stylised art and 6/10 also liked low-poly art. I also found that stylised art was the most liked and least disliked art style, and low-poly art was equally liked and disliked.
Since my game was going to be single-player, I also wanted to know whether they preferred single-player games or multiplayer games. This was to see how important playing with friends or other people was and to see if there was a connection between people who enjoyed walking simulators, low-poly and stylised art styles, and single-player games. I found that 70% of those people who enjoyed walking simulators preferred playing single-player games more than multiplayer games, and 30% of them preferred multiplayer games over single-player games.

Since my game will be based on memories of the main character's family and their struggles, I thought it may be important to see what sort of age range might be interested in playing my game. The reason why this might be important is that I might be more cautious about how graphic I want the memories to be. For Example, if one of the memories is his parents arguing, I might have to consider how violent and aggressive they are being since the more graphic it is, the higher the age rating will be. Now if my game was targeted towards young people I would have to be aware that my game adheres to the age restrictions rules. The results I got for this question were mostly late teens and early twenties with a few anomalies in the 40s and 50s.
I don't remember why I wanted to ask what their gender was since gender really doesn't and shouldn't play any role in what they may like and how I make my game. This information would only tell me more information about who might play my game but it wouldn't help any decision-making when creating my game. I can imagine how this may be somewhat useful information as there are plenty of stereotypes about what men and women enjoy and what sort of games they might play.
My last two questions were "what are you interested in /hobbies" and "what is your current job/course status". The purpose of these two questions was to get a better understanding of the type of personality and the time they might spend playing video games. Since my survey was handed to people I knew who enjoyed playing video games or have a good amount of knowledge of video games, these answers would be somewhat predictable. For example, how most of the hobbies were video games and how the majority of the answers for what job or course they were doing was either unemployed or games development course. And again there are a few anomalies with some people with full-time professional jobs.
Overall, the information I found was definitely of much help, and I plan to use this information to help me as much as possible during the pre-production and production stage of my project.

Secondary Research

Having both primary and secondary research is important because primary research can show evidence and secondary can back up and prove the primary research. Secondary research also allows me to do extra research on questions I didn't ask in my survey.

For my secondary research, I will be using google to find information about the questions I should have asked in my survey. I would like to know about the average computer specs for a gamer and why low poly games or both are liked and disliked equally.
According to parentsguidtogaming.co.uk the world's most average PC for gaming has:
- Intel 4770k CPU
- Z97 chipset Motherboard
- GeForce GTX 1060 6GB for 1080p resolution
- 16GB DDR3 Memory
And that it would cost no more than 600 pounds. I also searched what were the minimum requirements for any gaming PC and according to venturebeat.com the minimum requirements from the date it was published (24th of April 2022) are:
- A 3.6 GHz i7 3820 processor or equivalent
- NVIDIA GTX 1060 or AMD RX 480 graphics card
- 8GB of RAM
I also decided to have a look at the minimum and recommended requirements for a few games. I used steam to check for this information.

That Dragon, Cancer

ELDEN RING

Phasmophobia

Stardew Valley

What Remains of Edith Finch

My game would have similar minimum requirements as That Dragon, Cancer. What's good about this is that most people who play my game will easily be able to run my game smoothly and hopefully because of this have a pleasant experience playing my game.

The next topic I want to research is the reasoning behind why my survey shows low poly art style being evenly liked and disliked. I wasn't able to find any information on people's opinions on low-poly art style in games, however, I found a website that explained the advantages and disadvantages on low poly in games. According to joshocaoimh.com, low-poly art styles can either look stunning or amateur with very little middle ground between the two extremes. What differentiates the amateur-looking game from the stunning-looking game consists of two things - lighting and level of detail. To seem appealing, low poly scenes need adequate lighting. This can make it challenging to construct aesthetically appealing low poly games with day-night cycles or other types of dynamic lighting in which the designers have less control. Level of Detail is used in almost all games to boost performance. It includes employing low poly models in the distance that are replaced with higher poly copies when the player approaches. If low poly games feature big or open-world maps, they must employ Level of Detail to make them visually appealing.
I think because of this, many people may have had unpleasant experiences when playing low-poly games as it is so easy to go from amateur-looking to stunning-looking.