Final Assets and Reflection

As we were getting towards the end of the project, it was turning more from a grey box in to a finished game. I was being given assets to place in and others were placing in their own to the scene.

The climb rocks placed by Monika made a big difference.

I was also provided with platforms from Monika and Ed, which I then built or scaled in to what I needed.

Monika gave me some square platforms which I could scale in Maya and import easily, these were for the affected warp platforms.

Monika also gave me two varieties on plank, with this I built all of the wooden platforms, such as the ones the a grapple-able. A few warp platforms as part of a non-puzzle bridge moment were wooden as well, which I should perhaps have changed.

Ed gave me all the platforms for the gorge. We needed them to look like parts of the gorge, so it was a challenge keeping the same visual language previously formed whilst changing how they look. 

To identify the warp platform, Max, who gave me the rock stacks, gave me a moving/warping sand plane to become the visual language of these platforms.

However, not everything was perfect in the end. The sand planes did not get put in to the final presentation build, nor did anything to visually separate climb blocks from grapple climb blocks. The User Interface was not working properly and one bird animation where it flies overhead did not work properly. I feel this is partly due to use wanting to add a lot in a short space of time, which then became overwhelming for the person trying to sort it out alongside everything else that they need to include.

I feel that on the second part project, or this unit, that in some aspects I did better than I expected and in other I could have done things a lot better and I see potential shortcomings in my level design if not handled correctly. I have found designing game play brilliant but very challenging, there is a lot to think about from the root designs to working with everyone and making sure everything gets implemented properly, such as what makes things clearer to the player, which in the end we didn't quite have time for or only existed in my build.

If I were to go back and do this again, one thing I would do is try to get things in quickly and effectively. I do not feel like I could have done that at the time, but now feel I am in a much better position. Write a simple script, use a few animations for grappling, and you have a glitch free playable section. Although I like doing things on paper, I would have also liked to have thrown in a few more tests together in 3D, not just experiments but do more iterations for final puzzles, though it did get to a point where I had to move on. 

Some aspects of designs I have perhaps need extra featured to make them work properly that I did not think of, such as a changing camera view. I could have done coding better, it got very quick and almost seamless toward the end to the project, however I am aware that at some points I spent a lot of time coding something which resulted in being not needed or changed due to my own development decisions.

Though not perfect, I feel the areas in the game a gradual, interesting and fun and that a lot of what I wanted to do and create came across and worked well. An outside perspective may be different, on that note I think more play testing would have helped, but an early build or playable demo never really seemed to happen.

Overall I have very much enjoyed this project and am happy with the result, I feel like we have all done very well throughout the process and in the result we reached. I know I could have done things better and am always having ideas with how to improve it. With some further research and tweaking there could be some much more fine tuned game play.