Reflection on Work / Development

Reflection of current work:

Over the last year, I've felt myself grow a lot during games development and have become very proud of what I've been able to achieve. It's also allowed me to understand what I properly want to do as well; at the start of the year I felt like i didn't know what section of games development i wanted to do, but know i understand that overall game design and environmental design is my passion. 

Though I've gained some interest in the coding and modeling area's of games development too. This is all thanks to the team of people I've been working with this year, and because of the role i have as the Producer of the team, I have been working with everyone to put it all together and work in different sections when i am required too.  

Developing our game in Unreal 5 has also given me a lot of insight into games engines too, I'm still a little unfamiliar with many others, but the things I've learnt on UE5 should hopefully transfer over. The process for making out game has been abit shaky at times, since our idea had changed so much, we didn't have a solid plan for making/creating assets or mechanics. This is definitely something i would've liked to gone back and done in my first PowerPoint when i presented the idea. Regardless we've done well to make the game and I'm still very proud of our current progress. For myself, i wish i could've grey-boxed all the levels out first, and then we discuss what assets are needed, and the mechanics that we could implement. Instead our team has been going level by level and taking it slowly, which isn't a bad idea for people who haven't done this before.

I wish we had come up with the abandoned mine idea sooner, since I've really been liking the atmosphere the game has now. But due to how late into development we did the idea, we've not been able to polish the game as much. We have also had some issues with team members not being able to make it, so i may have to be working a few days without a coder/modeler. This has happened quite a lot and tends to set us back a few days. It's also become apparent that we spent abit too much time trying to make the first level really good, and we lost focus on many of the other levels because of that. We've been trying to catch up and are now working on the 3rd level.

I could've pulled my weight some more too, I've always had an issue when it comes to working in an area that I'm not experienced in. So if a team member isn't in, i usually just waited until they were, instead of trying to work on the section that needed to be worked on, regardless if what i did was just a step in the right direction.

However something i am very proud of in this game is how the lighting has turned out. We originally were going to have the cave be a lot more magical in nature, so we had to the idea of having torches light your way as you walked through. But after looking at it for a while, and with the idea change, we decided to change them to look a lot more industrial, adding some fog to make it really stand out. We've been using this same lighting in the 2nd and 3rd level, and is overall one of my favorite things to work on when it comes to design.

Talking to our client and actually having a client to work for this entire time, has helped boost my confidence a lot as a game developer. It allows us to get actual feedback and get a good outline of what people are looking for, without holding our idea's back. As well as working with a client, we're also planning to show our game off at the Forum in Norwich in the upcoming weeks. We've done presentations with our client and the person who is running the event at the forum, the ability to present our idea's to people who care and will give us really good criticism back is a great boost in confidence as well. The meetings and presentations we did with our client are actually what made us change our game so majorly to begin with. He started giving out idea's like: Having batteries for the flashlight, having a more defined theme, having more lights so the player doesn't get lost etc. These are all idea's which we've taken into our game and it has improved a lot because of them.

Overall, I'm really proud of how our game has come out. I wouldn't change much at the moment though, the main thing i would want to change is our approach, and the fact our idea wasn't rounded out and solid from the beginning.