YEAR 3 - BA3b - Evaluation

I'm very happy with the current state of the game. It's still not finished and released like I was hoping for but it's certainly finished enough to take to exhibitions and I'll be taking it to 3 in the next few months. I've learned a lot about how to finish a game and the first few weeks felt like a big learning curve in terms of motivating myself to work on the boring stuff like menus, save systems and UX. Once I made some headway though I started to enjoy doing all the boring stuff too as the game was starting to feel more and more like a finished product. I prefer to work on the systems so I put off working on the character design, which I new needed changing early on in the project. However it payed off as when I started to think about the character in terms of solving a problem, which in this case was displaying the UI, I created a really great design that helped to streamline the rest of development from then on. I would argue though that if I had come up with that character earlier in development, I wouldn't have had to go back and redesign lots of game elements, which would have saved me time.

I feel my programming skill has improved a lot but working solo on every element of the game has improved my understanding of managing a project even more. In the past I would have developed the first solution that came to mind when thinking about something like tracking the number of rounds won, but this project has taught me to take a step back a bit and brain storm ideas in Photoshop first. Some of the best work in the project has been created in this way; I think I've found a new design pipeline. Using Olly Moss's style as a reference has been hugely beneficial to the art direction as it's allowed me to relatively quickly create concepts for areas and immediately implement them in the game as backgrounds.

I've slacked a bit in terms of posting content about my game on social media other than the occasional #screenshotsaturday but I've made up for it with all the connections and feedback I got at EGX and NIGD meetups. I'm confident the new characters, logo and icon I created have improved the cohesion and marketability of the game and I'm looking forward to figuring out more about the world these characters live in. I'd like to do some kind of environmental story telling with the locations and collectable items at some point before release. I'm also very happy with how the business cards have turned out and I'm looking forward to distributing them and the stickers at NGF in a couple of weeks.

I've done my best to create a game that can cater to both new and seasoned gamers in terms of making the game forgiving and immediately fun enough to pickup and play whilst also having the depth and skill ceiling of a competitive game. Also in the sense of art direction; I've made characters that are customizable and likeable at first glance but a world that has the depth and atmosphere that should keep players wanting to learn more. I've even applied this methodology to the marketing of the game with the various clips I've uploaded, business cards and stickers as well as designing a competitive game that people might want to stream/ share footage of online and the [::] motif I've tried to repeat throughout the game and promotional material.