FINAL MAJOR PROJECT
- Izabelle Tooze
SHOWCASE AND PRODUCTION REVIEW
Here is my final product of this project, including a video of how the game looks and a link to play it yourself.
Here is the audio recording of my production review with a teacher, going over the production process, what I have learnt and some of my reasoning.
FINAL EVALUATION
PROJECT OVERVIEW
My original goal was to create a 2D adventure game with rhythm based combat and cutscenes, which I think I kept to pretty closely and I completed up to a point which I wanted. I intended in improving my skills in construct as I knew I would need lots of new skills for this kind of game, compared to the game I had made previously. I also wanted to improve my skills in pixel art and animation to simply make the game look better and to get across what I wanted to. I think these skills were appropriate as I used them extensively throughout the project and developed them a lot, especially the skills in construct. These skills helped me accomplish my project as I was able to create the game itself using my research into construct, and make the game itself look good with these new skills in pixel art and what I learnt from my research. I think the biggest success in my project was the combat, as it is the most polished part of the game and the most fun to play in my opinion.
PROJECT CHALLENGES
The biggest problem I came across while making the game was probably construct, there was lots of small issues and mistakes which were very time consuming to fix and hard to find to begin with. There was also the bigger issue of the combat being out of time between different computers, which I spoke about more during the production review above. I overcame these problems by just having more experience in construct, which made it easier to find and fix issues with the game. I also used research to fix some issues, by finding construct tutorials online. One aspect of the project that could of gone better was the design of the overworld and some of the sprite work on it. I feel like it looks quite empty and the sprites for the player and guide look very amateur compared to how the cutscenes and combat look. There are also some issues with the cutscenes, not all of the text boxes can be skipped which makes it slow to get through, and the text doesn't scroll fast enough. The 3 key lessons I learned from this project was to; leave enough time to polish the game and the sprites, do as much playtesting as possible and to not lose motivation over small issues in the code.
PLAY-TEST / FEEDBACK
For my playtesting I sent out a survey with a link to the game and some questions which can be seen here.
Here is the first question I asked and what feedback I got. I'm glad that the music was someone's favourite part as it was a big focus of the game. It was also interesting that one person liked the mystery of the game, as I didn't specifically design it to be mysterious but I'm glad it gave this effect anyway.
I totally agree with the complaint that cutscenes are too long as I felt it myself when playtesting. I would definitely change this about the game if I had more time to work on it. The complaint that the combat was too difficult is also valid as
because I have been playing it over and over during development for me it is easy, and I'm not sure how difficult it is for newcomers. If I was making this game as a retail product I would definitely add different difficulty settings and a more fleshed out tutorial to avoid this.
The main response I got from this was issues with the buttons, which is surprising as I did a playtest all around making the buttons better. Because of this obvious mix of different opinions, I would definitely add the option to
change the buttons to whatever the player liked to avoid this issue if I had more time. I don't really understand the point about people with disabilities, as there is no real way to change this game to be played if someone cant use their hands. But if I was making this into a real game I would take it into consideration and maybe add something like controller support to help this.
Here I got the feedback that the characters didn't really have much personality, which makes sense as the guide is only there to guide the player. Obviously if I kept on making the game I would be able to include lots more characters with distinct personalities.
The last bit of feedback was about the games music. Maybe to make the music for the first combat better I could make it more dramatic and fast, more like the
second combat's song as that was apparently better. What I also got from this is that the game needs more smaller sound effects, like a sound when the player falls into the world which I could definitely implement in the future.