Final Product & Evaluation

My Pitch

Reflecting on my pitch

feedback given in video

As you can tell what I have done compared to what I said I wanted to do in my pitch has completely changed. My pitch is very unorganised and my idea was not thought out properly. Because of the lack of planning and organisation, I was not able to present a good pitch. I did not explain what I wanted my game to be, which is the whole purpose of making a pitch. What went well in my pitch was that I attempted to explain what type of art style I wanted to do and I showed many picture examples of what I liked the look of. This was good because although I didn't clearly explain exactly what art style I was planning on doing I was still able to show what I was going for. Another thing I think I did well on, was the survey I did. I think that asking questions like "have you played any walking simulation games? And if so did you enjoy it?" was a good question to ask because I only had answers from the people in my course, which is a games development course. Therefore finding out how many people who play games have played a walking simulator and whether they would like to is a good question to see how popular the genre of game is. I think I could have improved this by adding a follow-up question asking why they haven't played a walking simulator and what they enjoyed about walking simulators, would have helped me understand what people enjoy about walking simulators and what to add to mine. Another great question was asking them if they have played or wanted to play walking simulators that were similar to my idea. I think this is a good question as I get an insight into who might want to play the game I create. The fifth question I asked was supposed to ask whether or not they would play my game, however, the question describes my game to be "stuck in a trippy dream/nightmare", this itself isn't enough information for someone to give a good answer to. The question doesn't state simple aspects about a game like whether it's multiplayer or single-player, if it's first person or third person, what the story is about, what art style it would be in, and so on. Due to me not having a clear idea of what I wanted to do, my pitch ended up being unorganised and unsuccessful. Next time I have to make a pitch for a project, I will make sure that I thoroughly plan out my idea and presentation so I prevent this from happening again.

My Final Product

Please mute volume

For my Final Major Project, I was given the task to make a walking simulator. There were two pathways I was given to focus on for the game, as making a whole playable game would have been exceedingly difficult to complete for the amount of time we had been given to complete this. The two options that were given to me were to focus on either environment art or game mechanics. Because I have had more experience in modeling, UV mapping, and texturing, I decided to focus on the environment art for the game I would be making. My game idea is set in a European village, and it tells a story about this man's family's struggles through memories when he revisits his childhood village.

I started my project with a poorly planned idea and jumped straight into the production stage instead of doing in-depth research and planning beforehand. This ended up going downhill extremely quickly, giving me no option but to restart and teaching me that I can't jump into making a project without planning. Because of this setback, I had misspent six worthy weeks of time. That time also includes the Easter holidays when I tried fixing and planning the project I started. I abandoned this project as it seemed unfixable and started from scratch again, except with only a month left to complete it. I could have predicted this was going to happen as this happens often. I get too excited about a project and jump straight into the fun part, which is modeling and texturing, without going through considerably the most important yet boring part of the project, researching, and planning. I will definitely learn from this experience to carefully plan and research my idea before I go anywhere near any modeling or texturing software because of how much stress I went through to get back on schedule after wasting so much time on an abandoned project. So at this moment, I had to come up with a new idea that was fairly similar to what I was originally going for so that I wouldn't have to re-pitch my idea and rewrite my proposal form. This was so I do not spend any more of my shortened time on things I had already done. Looking through my Context & Research page, I'm happy that I managed to complete most of the research I intended to do, however, I would have liked to do more research on what makes a walking simulator game successful. I also would have liked to do more research on European villages and how they're so unique compared to other villages around the world. The reason I wasn't able to do this research and go more in-depth with my other research was obviously because of the time I was left with. I think doing more research on Europe would have definitely helped me make my level look more like it fit my theme. However, from the feedback I got from my class on my final week, everyone who watched the short clip of my level and did my survey after, said that my level did indeed fit the theme of a European village. This was good to hear, however, there are only 6 respondents, which is too little of a number to say that everyone who plays my game will see that my game fits my theme. Context & Research could have definitely had more work put towards it, however, with the lack of time I had, I was not able to do so.

The same problem I had with Context and Research, I also had with my Pre-Production and Production part of the project. I knew this section would take the longest as I am not a professional at modeling or texturing. I am glad I decided to make my level in a low-poly art style because if I had chosen to do a stylised art style I would have not been able to do as much on this section compared to how much I eventually did. Looking back on my page and at my asset list, I remember that I quickly made this asset list. I wish I had made a more detailed asset list that included a short description of what each model should look like as the list I made is very vague. I also wrote more models than I made because I underestimated how long it would take to model, texture, and place in Unreal Engine. I would go through a process during this stage. It would start off with finding reference pictures on google or Artstation for the selected model and importing them to Microsoft Whiteboard. I used Microsoft Whiteboard instead of PureRef which is more commonly used with game devs because I found PureRef to be too confusing to navigate. I would then open Maya 2022 and make my model. I then would UV map and export and import it into Photoshop where I would make the texture. I then would export the texture into a PNG file and export the model into an FBX file and import those into Unreal Engine. Lastly, I would place the model and reshape the object accordingly to my level and create a new material to add the UV map and add that material to the assigned model. If needed I would also add constants to roughness and metallic and adjust the value onto the material. I would also immediately after finishing that, write it up onto Wix as the process of modeling and texturing was fresh in my memory. Because of this method, I would often have all softwares open at the same time, and this would lead to my computer overworking itself and therefore causing it to overheat. This meant that a couple of times when I was doing work non-stop for several hours my computer would sometimes just suddenly turn off. Because of this, I lost a lot of work. What I did to combat this problem in case it ever happened again, which it did, I set all my software to autosave so that I wouldn't lose a significant amount of work if it happened again. This was proven to work as my computer suddenly just turned off however all my work was successfully saved before. During this time of production, I also encountered another problem. This was that I kept forgetting my external hard drive at home or at college which meant that I would have to go a day or more without having my project to work on. I found the solution to this and that was instead of saving all my work only on the hard drive, but to also save it on my college's OneDrive. Overall I think I could have made a few more models and that would have helped my level look more complete. However, I had a very short amount of time. I thought I would have enough time to also finish making my windows and model a lampost and some floral decorations but I did not end up having enough time for that.

During the final week of my project, I showed my class a video of my level and asked them to give me feedback by answering the questions on my survey. Although I only got 6 responses, the feedback was overall positive. Six out of six of them agreed that my level looked like a walking simulator. When asked about what they liked and disliked about my models, they liked the colours and that my level looked interesting. However, they disliked how small the level was and how some parts of my level looked incomplete. The average of what they rated my level from 1 to 10, was a lovely 8.17/10.

I think I did a good job considering I had less than half the time that I was supposed to have due to my own selfinflicted decisions. I wish I had more time to complete my work at a higher and more acceptable standard.