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Survive & Thrive Evaluation

With regards to my research into the elements of the 'Survive and Thrive theme' as documented in my initial posts (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/158349496100/this-is-my-mind-map-laying-out-the-general-codes), I decided to go for a game that used more elements from the 'Survival' theme and genre, rather than thrive. This is because the common codes and conventions of survival games are much easier to research and understand than games that cater more to a 'Thrive' theme. In addition to this, survival games helps to adhere to my target audience more as they won't be catering to a niche. If I were more confident in my abilities or had a team to work with I may have gone for the more niche option in order to collate my current skills and learn about a new niche style of game.

 At the start of this project I designed plans in order to help compliment my practical work as well as my research throughout the project. I used my proposal (uploaded on Moodle) as a starting point for this work, and so this reflects my initial ideas and aspirations for the project. Within the proposal I have stated that there will be multiple characters within the game, as well as a higher emphasis on this bond. When comparing this to my final project, I decided to remove the companion character from the game, in order to maintain my schedule and to also allow me to focus more on the game- play mechanics, as this was an area which I wanted to focus upon within this project. If I were to do this again I would start smaller, and add elements onto my game rather than plan for too much work and have to downgrade throughout the project.

 When discussing my plans for research I mentioned that I would analyse other pieces of media as well as carry out primary research that will help my pre-production and production stages. Throughout my project I have carried out clear research, such as these surveys and interviews: (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/159184967020/most-important-aspects-to-game-development) that have had a direct effect on my practical work and has helped me shape a product that helps to appeal to my target audience. I feel that this was one of my stronger areas, however if I were to do this again I would look at a wider variety of sources such as more books and films, in order to gain a higher understanding of my product and the common codes of media and marketing.

 The progression of my work from section to section as well as in minute decision making reflects well from my blog posts, with production diaries (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/160809916425/mans-best-friend-production-diary) helping to establish key points where I have progressed in the overall creation of my product, as well as the research blog posts dictating where I have expanded my knowledge of the subject that I am analysing. The discrepancy that I found that I could have added was the addition of dates in to the posts that I have made in order to structure my blog more effectively as well as maintain a higher level of professionalism within my work portfolio.

 The evidence that I have shown for my work is shown throughout my blog as production diaries that display the kinds of practical steps I have taken to solving a problem illustrated in the beginning proposal, as referenced before. These posts vary from videos to screenshot-filled text based posts that illustrate the kind of techniques I have used for each section within my game. These production diaries help to show the progression as I mentioned before, but they also allow me to show off the skills that I have learnt as a result of my research into the given areas, and also helps to show exactly how I work in order to create a project. If I were to do this again, I would make sure to physically date each production diary so that the logs of my production are easier to find and are able to  be constructed as a timetable.

 With regards to my initial idea that was laid out within my proposal, I think that my project did communicate effectively with my audience in both an interactive, visual, and auditory sense, and this is apparent due to the post-production tests that I made in order to interact with the audience that I have collated throughout the project. These tests show a clear increase in quality between the various stages of production, which leads me to believe that this product communicates well to my audience. If I were to revisit this area, I would make sure to make these surveys more in-depth in order to gain better and more specific data.

 The changes that I faced within my project were quite large, however I felt that the way that I dealt with these issues has helped me to gain a better understanding on how to take on big changes and affect my own workflow in order to maintain the most amount of efficiency and effectiveness in my work. For example, one of the main changes that I had to make was the removal of one of my companion characters within the game, as documented within this post: (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/160690656175/mans-best-friend-production-diary-pt2). While this was a large change, using my skills within world building and coding I was able to adjust the lore of my world as well as change around my gameplay mechanics in order to still appeal to my target audience. In my next project I will make sure to solidify my pre-production and research in order to make sure that these kinds of changes don't need to be made in the future, and also to help me deal with problems such as this as they arise in other projects.

My initial idea differs quite a lot from the project that I ended up creating and this is due to me making decisions that either helped me create a better product in the time given, or decisions made based upon the research that I have done, so that my project will be more professional, more representative of the media form I'm working in, as well as more appealing to the audience I am presenting it to. The changes that had to be made were due to me over-estimated the amount of work that I would be able to do in the time span provided, and as a result I had to cut back, detailed in this post: (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/160690656175/mans-best-friend-production-diary-pt2). In my next project I will make sure to work up from a small idea, rather than work down from a larger project, so that I'm constantly adding and progressing upwards, rather than moving downwards and constricting myself.

   My strengths detailed at the start of the project were relating to various tools that I used for my previous project within my proposal (On Moodle), these tools being the software behind my  work. I think that I used these skills in a way that allowed me to create a good, professional product in the time span I was given. However, I made sure not to focus on my strengths too much, and look to areas that I don't think that I am as highly skilled in, such as artistic design. I made sure to limit the amount of work that I was doing for each section, so that I wasn't oversaturating various areas in my work, and also being able to tackle each subject with the same amount of effort in order to create a useful work environment for me to improve my skills, such as those within art and level design.

 Through the use of production diaries and other blog posts in order to detail my work such as in the v-log that I made (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/160474404945/soundtrack-production-diary-vlog) as well as other production posts referenced earlier. I have kept a track of my various skills and how I have improved in various areas. For example using my new found skills in producing music I was able to create higher quality tracks for my game, as well as being able to use more artistic abilities that I did not have before, such as the ability to create enemies that fit the semiotics that I tried to convey, in order to reach my audience in a more effective manner. This shows that I have learnt to use various theories such as the idea of semiotics, in order to create a better project. If I were to revisit this section I would focus more on trying new things that may or may not work, in order to gain more knowledge of elements that I may not already understand.

 The way that I found my target audience was by looking at similar comparative products that helped me gain more ideas for my game, such as in the 'Fallout 4 Analysis' and 'DayZ HUD Analysis' posts (https://camno-college-blog.tumblr.com/post/158354165710/dayz-hud-analysis) and also gave me a decent age rating to work with, as well as giving me information as to how they reached this audience. This was the main way that I established my audience, as well as looking around at my area and taking elements from anecdotal evidence to help further my research methodology. If I were to do this again, I would access a wider variety of sources as well as try and branch out from my comfort zone, and choose a target audience that is different ad unexplored with regards to my own knowledge.

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Bugfixing 04/06/17

 As a result of my playtest, I have decided to work on the bugs that were found as a result of them playing my game. One of the first issues that arose was the game's 'door' to the next level was unlocked at a lower 'enemies defeated' counter than what is said within the objective. This change shown above means that players will have to defeat 10 enemies before moving on, which is what is said before the level starts. This fixes the problem that was found and also makes the game better suited for the players as the instructions are now more evident within the gameplay mechanics.

The second issue that was mentioned was the lack of a musical soundtrack within the first tutorial level that made the game feel anticlimactic when moving into the first level. As my audience mentioned an issue related to this element of my game I decided to make this my next area to focus on and fix. What I did was import a sound within my game that is actually a full musical track that fitted my game and also made that play during the first section of my game. This fixes the second issue that players reported back in my playtesting survey. Overall these fixes should make my game better for my players and help to deliver a more finished product.

 Here is the overall layout for my last level within my game. When we relate this back to my original design, there are a few subtle changes that I have made due to not having enough time, and as a result I had to change my ideas to fit my time schedule. The main difference is the lack of a middle section filled with water, which was used to signify the level within the deigns. I went with this linear pathway idea in order to differentiate from the general open feeling of the first level. This also costs lest resources to make as a result, which means that production is a lot more seamless.

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Playtesting Survey Results - 30/05/2017

This question was designed in order to show the kinds of age ranges that existed within the survey. From the results that I got, we can see that the majority of people that entered within my survey were between the ages of 16 and 20. This works well as the target audience that I am looking for is between the ages of 16-18 year olds, so the information that I will have gathered from the next questions, will be better suited to appealing to my audience.

      From this question, which relates to how easy the game was to control, the majority of my testers stated that the game was useful to control, and as a result I do not think that I need to affect anything within the game. If I were to affect and change it, I would look further into coding and attempt to fix certain issues within the controls of my game.

    This question is used to show what people thought of the level design within my game. I made sure to take this into account when designing my game as this will allow me to have an appealing game for my audience, as well as have an interesting layout to secondary audiences, such as those that enjoy top down shooters/action games. From the data that I have collated, the majority of people did not find an issue with the level design, and actually thought that the level design was above average. This shows that this area isn’t something I should focus on, but if I were to, I would create different areas that perform different actions, such as teleports or dashes to change the way the movement mechanics act, creating more gameplay mechanics and making the game more fun as a result.

    As we can see, there is a very varied opinion on the music and sound design showed within my game. This shows that while some people really enjoyed it, there were others that thought it was sub-par. This is most likely due to the issue that music is such a vast area that certain questions can be misinterpreted or too vague to pull useful information from. If I were to ask this again, I would most likely try to make it as specific to certain aspects of the sound design as possible.

      This question is useful to progress my production and help me gain a better idea of how comfortable my target audience feels with various areas within my project, and allows me to address elements of the game in order to appeal to my target audience more. For this, we can see that there is a majority split between ‘1-10’ and ’21-10’. In order to pander to both of these audiences I will have to increase the amount of enemies needed to beat the level, to a rate that satisfies both parties, so an area that is in between both of those ranges is the solution that I have found for this issue.

    This area is where most of my major criticism comes for my game, and also addresses the areas that are a major issue that needs to be fixed immediately. The very first comment in the list isn’t a bug, but rather a miscommunication of the gameplay mechanics in relation to traditional means. For example, in games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992), the control scheme allows you to move diagonally, whereas in my game you aren’t, similar to games like Dig Dug (1982). This shows that my target audience interpreted this as a bug.

  Two bugs that were of the same general nature were the bugs showing that you could beat the game after only three kills instead of the instructed 10. This was an oversight as I had forgotten to change this before sending out the playtesting copy, and as such this will be one of the areas I fix before the final playtest.

The very first comment is something that I need to take into account when designing music for this game as well as any projects within the future. For my next production diary I will make sure to add in more music in order to rectify this issue, and have my game be more appealing to my target audience.

  Overall, I think that I gained a lot of data that can be used to help aide my production, either through further research into my audience or through critical assessment of elements within my game that require maintenance or changing in order to fit better and to make my project seem more professional. This will help me deliver a cleaner, finished product that also allows me to make more improvements quicker in the future.

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Playtesting Revision

As a result of analysing my previous playtesting surveys and analysing where I am at in regards to my production, I feel that the best way in gaining more useful data would be to create a mid-production playtest, complete with a survey that will be linked to the game. This will help me gain a better understand of what my game needs in order to be better and also how to fix certain aspects to my game.

  This question is designed to analyse the age ratings of the people that have played my game and are then taking the test. This will help me gauge the accuracy of my results and also allow me to see how well they fit in with my target audience of 16-18 year olds, in addition to the other reasons that I gave in my previous post relating to my ‘audience age’ question.

    This question addresses one of the main concerns within my game. As I spend more time creating and testing the game myself, I am becoming more and more used to the mechanics in my game, and as a result, the game will feel easier to play to me. This question helps me find the difficulty level that the players believe my game is at, and I can adjust certain variables within my game to make it easier or harder.

  This question helps to understand if my level design needs to be changed at all to make my game play better. This means that during my ‘resolution’ period of my Gantt Chart, the time can be used effectively to make my game better.

  The music and sound design of my game are important aspects that I wish to focus on in order to help solidify the world and create a unique atmosphere that is interesting for the player to explore and inhabit. This question allows me to check and see if the game’s music fits within the genre and theme of my game well and also helps to show if the music is too loud or aggressive.

  This question relates to my main objective within my game, which will also decide on the kind of playtime that my players will face, as the higher the objective, the long it will take to get to that objective. This also helps me gain a better understanding of what my target audience wants out of my game, to make sure that I can edit my game to be the best possible product for my audience.

  The bugfixing question will help me find major/minor bugs within my game that could cause issues for other playtesters. This helps me deliver a more polished product that will appeal to a wider, more expecting audience. The comments/queries section helps me to find other elements within the game that I may not have covered within any of the other questions.

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Production Diary 23/05/17

Because the laptop that I originally started the project on was not strong enough to continue working on the project, I had to port my game over to the PCs that we have available at college. This was an oversight that I did not realise as I haven't used GameMaker for an extended amount of time on my laptop, and as a result I did not realise that my laptop wouldn't be strong enough to handle the program. After porting all of the files to the PCs at the college, however, I am able to continue the production.

 The next step for my game was to create 'Views'. These allow me to edit the way the camera works within my game, and allows me to create a more appealing and more challenging perspective that the player has to work with. As a result of my research from Rayman 3 (2004), I noticed that having a problematic camera can make or break the game entirely and cause issues for the players, so I decided to make sure that my camera had enough viewspace in order to make it appealing for the players, as well as being challenging.

 The next step was creating a score meter for the amount of enemies that the player had defeated as a way to show the progression to an objective. To do this I drew the score at a certain area connected to my main player in order to show the score, and this will incentivise the player to continue playing in order to reach the high score. The issue that I came across was that the score box would replace the sprite for my character, and this very clearly breaks immersion and is a bug that needs to be fixed. I plan on instead removing the score meter and just having an objective, then an unseen variable. The opening to the next level will then open with a sound attributed to it in order to signify that it has been opened. This gives my player auditory and visual feedback on their action, and allows them to see how to progress.

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Rayman 3 Analysis

The genre of Rayman 3 (2004) is a fantasy game as shown by the colour palette and design choices, however my game is a different genre, and so I will make sure that the colour palette for my game doesn't used the dark blues and purples found within this game.

Rayman 3 contains a health bar, which is an item of hud that I should include within my game in order to give the player visual feedback on stats within the game.

The camera angles seen within Rayman 3 are shot at a third person perspective, different to my game which is 2D and top down. However, the camera angles that I saw within Rayman were quite awkward to work with, and as a result made the rest of the game harder to play. I plan to avoid this within my game, by creating camera angles that help to deliver a unique and interesting playing field, while also being useful within the game.

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Revising my Playtesting Survey

For my previous project I created a playtesting survey in order to gain real time feedback as a result of people playing my game. This allowed me to make changes that helped to make my game better and more suited for the audience I will be putting it out for, and also help to fix any issues that appear throughout playing. Listed below are some of the questions that I have used before, and how I will refine them or change them so that they fit into my game and give me the most useful data.

 This question was designed in order to get data relating to how much the player enjoyed playing the game, from a scale of 1 to 10. The issues that this created was the way that I had laid out the answering boxes. This gave me a variety of different ways that the question was answered ,which made the answer process more confusing as a result, giving me different solutions to answering the question such as treating the boxes as a bar graph, bar chart, or just writing in their answer as a number. In order to rectify this I will create my answers with a very clear answering method that gives me a selection of answers that are the same and don’t cause confusion later in the project. Realistically I would also try to make my questions overall more specific, creating other questions relating to smaller, more in-depth areas of the gameplay, art, and other areas.

 This question was designed to once again, gain opinions on a certain area within the project, the area here being the level design specifically. Here I only gave three options in order to try and refine the data into numbers which I can use to create better, more legible results and tables in the future. The issues that had arisen from the way that I approached this question was the less professional wording and the vagueness of the answers that I had wanted to receive, this makes the information gathered less effective as it does not directly relate to my target audience, nor does it give me useful information that I can pull that isn’t hugely biased.

 This question was used as a way of identifying the main bugs and glitches that appeared within my game. This worked well, and allowed me to change various elements such as how loud the music/sound effects were, as well as major bugs such as items that allowed access to other levels not working/appearing. The only issue that I came across with this question is players mentioning ‘bugs’ that were in fact, gameplay elements. I do not think that this question needs revising as people will think that different areas of the game are bugs/glitches, so I can focus on the areas that I know are legitimate bugs and fix them in a later bug-fixing session.

 These two questions are very similar to the question that I had at the beginning of the survey. The only issue that I discovered was that there were spelling errors which cause both of these questions to be the same. If I were to use a different program and proof check my work the next time I create a survey then these mistakes will not appear.

 The final element that I play to bring back in my next survey is the addition of an ‘additional comments/queries’ box, where testers can add concerns if there is not direct question about it. This will help flesh out more problems that my initial questions might have missed out on, thus giving me better qualitative data to work with.

 In addition to everything that I mentioned within this post, I will not being creating my questionnaires physically, but will instead use a service such as Google Forms (Google, 2017) or Survey Monkey (SurveyMonkey, 2017) in order to create digital surveys. This will increase the quality of my surveys, as well as allow me to send them to a wider range of people, thus giving me more responses.

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Current Review - 18/05/17

As it stands right now, I am very well on track with regards to my planning and inspiration for my game, and I should be able to easily finish the game within the allotted time. I plan on creating an ‘indev’ executable file that can then be hosted and sent around, attached will also be a document that allows for me to gain feedback on my game, such as the gameplay mechanics and colour palettes. This gives me more research to use in order to suit my game better to my target audience.

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Man’s Best Friend Production Diary

This is the current object list within my game, that details everything that I currently have to use as placable assets within my game. Over time, more assets get added, and so I decide to look to the asset list within GameMaker first in order to see if there are any changes that have been made. This allows me to quickly see where I am at in terms of production, and as such, this is why it is at the first of my post.

The first new feature that has been added is the 'Spawner' object. This object creates an enemy randomly with a 1 in 70 chance per tick to spawn. This adds a level of replayability within my game, and is also relevant to the game mechanics I am using within my game. The 'spawner' aspect of my game is a very common convention within survival games such as the Call of Duty: Black Ops (2012) Zombies mode, or even old classic games such as Pac Man (1980) still use this mode. This is also useful for bug testing as it means that I can directly control the flow of enemies, thereby creating a useful way to change the difficulty of the game quickly.

The next element within my asset list is a variation on the original 'tutorial' object seen in the first tutorial level. The 'You_dead' object is a sign saying 'You Died...' and this is used within the 'Dead_Room' in order to give the player a notice saying that their character has perished. This is useful as it gives the player direct feedback and makes sure that they aren't confused about what is going on within the game. I decided to give it a scrolling text aesthetic, which not only solidifies that style throughout my game (as the scrolling text box appears earlier in the game) but also fits well within games with an 8-bit style that also contain text boxes, such as Pokemon: Ruby (2003) or Stardew Valley (2016).

The last element within my object list is the 'Enemy' object. This object is aptly named as this is the enemy that is featured within my game, and adds to the gameplay mechanic of a 'horde'. They are spawned from the spawners on the ground, and attempt to get close to the player and damage them, eventually leading to the player's demise. This is the danger within the game, and is also the main objective, as to get to the next level you will have to defeat a certain number of them before a passageway opens up. The design aspects of this sprite can be found in my previous post, 'Enemy Design'.

 Each of these contain various amounts of Drag and Drop coding attached to each of them, the exception being the sign as a different section within the death state screen will have the coding to do what I want. The enemy is programmed to follow the player and try to touch them, dealing damage as they collide with the player.

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Enemy Design

Pictured above is the sprite for the enemies within my game. As my artistic skill is not at a level where I feel comfortable attempting realistic enemies, I chose to go for a more simplistic style that helps to show various different elements in a character without spending too much time on the actual design.

 The first element that I made sure to incorporate into my enemy was the colour scheme that would help to deliver a strong semiotic-based message, as well as create an interesting design for the player. The main colours that I have used within this design are red and black, colours that are often depicted for the enemy in games such as the injury indicators in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2012) or the enemy HUD items in Fallout 4 (2015). I also chose red and black as these are the main colours for the enemy faction, the  BWF, so this character design fits within the lore of my game.

 This design was created with perspective in mind, as the player could potentially get confused if the character design looked as though it was backwards or looking in a different direction than it is supposed to. For this design, the sprite is looking down and I have included the use of various elements to make sure that this is very clear, such as the use of eyes on the bottom and the weapons in either hand to be facing down as well.

 Lastly, the shape of the character is designed to mimic other pixel art games, such as The Escapists (2012), that incorporate enemies and players that are very block-shaped, much like my enemy. This also works for nostalgia when trying to attract a larger secondary audience, as this reflects character designs from older games such as Pac Man (1980) and Space Invaders (1978).

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Bug-fixing

Another issue that I have found while trying to code collision within my game and how the world interacts with the main character and their attacks. The issue that I came across was that if you were to press a key and release it while the character was moving, the character would stop moving. This causes issues regarding the controls and makes it harder to move about.

 What I did instead was used the command 'Keyboard <no key>' and added that to the code. This makes it so that if no key is pressed when the game is running, the character stops. This works as it means that you cam press multiple key and it won't affect the controls of the game. This makes the controls more structured and user-friendly and helps to appeal to the audience that is playing my game.

[camno-college-blog]

Here we have more sprites that I have created in order to populate my world and give a good direction for the player in order to make a world that looks more populated and realistic, in conjunction with my research that I have done on the level design, such as my level design documents, my post on 'Analysing Locations: London', and other posts in which I have planned for my levels' designs.

 The tiles that I have created above are for a road design mimicking the realistic nature of roads having double yellow lines within the borders. I took this idea and used it within my tiles in order to create noticeable boundaries to differentiate the mostly black road tiles with other tiles that may have a darker hue surrounding them. This also subtly implies that there is a pathway to follow, and this can add to the gameplay mechanics of my game.

Here we have the overall layout of my second level, with various sprites added in. This shows that my world is actually laid out in the style of a downtown area, and this gives the player a unique area to play in. This design is reminiscent of level from other survival games, such as Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2012), and notably the Zombies mode. This mode contained various maps that establish a unique mixture of wide open areas as well as tight spaces, such as the map Transit, which contains areas such as the initial spawn area, which is wide open like the spawning area of my game, however also contains corridors and alleyways to induce panic and fear within the player, and also to vary the difficulty of the map.

 The colours within my game are designed to give off a more industrial and dark feel, to contrast the first tutorial level which has a more upbeat and noticeably brighter feel. This fits well into ideas relating to colour psychology as well as the fact that different colours in different areas can help to keep players interested, as humans are naturally curious, so creating different instances of varying themes will help to subtly incentivise the player to keep moving forward and exploring.

[camno-college-blog]

Man’s Best Friend Production Diary Pt.2

One of the problems that I have come into contact with while developing my game was that I was not able to create my main game mechanic in the initial way I had thought of to fix this problem. As such, I have decided to create a different solution to this problem. After trying to think of different ways I could code this in order to work, I realised that I could potentially change my general game mechanic and slight lore-based elements in order to produce a project that still works within my story however is also feasible within my time frame and without too many potholes within my working.

 I decided to remove the main human companion from the main story, as this would have taken too much time to code and animate with my current skills, so I have opted to have the main gameplay be focused around my one main character. This helps the gameplay to be more player-centric, and to help create a good atmosphere for players during the game. This also helps to create the lonely, isolated and alone feeling that many single player survival games try to create, such as Fallout 4 (2015) or Mad Max (2015).

 The other aspect that I have added within my game is the idea that the main character's attacks, i.e, the dog shouts, are the ones that will affect the enemies, rather than the companion's attacks dealing damage. This allows me to prioritise my code better and avoids any problematic complications as a result of mixing together code that I am not as familiar with, thus allowing me to create my project in a shorter time span.

 So in order to complete my game fully I added the ability to move from the first tutorial level to the actual gameplay-based level via a door, however this door can only be accessed once you have removed all of the target dummies from the level by using your attack on them. This gives the player incentive to continue playing, and also helps to have the players understand the main gameplay mechanics. I also created a small text box with continuously updating text that gives the player instructions on how to move and how to attack. I plan on creating another box in order to visually show what the player needs to do in order to move to the next level, similar to the way that games like Castle Crashers teach via using the actual mechanics in-game.

Another aspect that I have to add into my game is the creation of more tiles for the 'Downtown' level. This process will allow me to have more assets that I can use within the overall creation of my level. In addition to this, I will also have to code enemies, which I can use the knowledge from my last project on to create a more complex enemy system and this can help to add to the gameplay mechanics within my world. In order to research these tiles as I create them I will look up various designs of the tiles I wish to imitate and draw inspiration from. The way that I created the tiles was that they would run effectively from one tile to another to create a useful tiling/brick-like effect, such as in the image below.

[camno-college-blog]

Man’s Best Friend production Diary Pt. 2

One of the problems that I have come into contact with while developing my game was that I was not able to create my main game mechanic in the initial way I had thought of to fix this problem. As such, I have decided to create a different solution to this problem. After trying to think of different ways I could code this in order to work, I realised that I could potentially change my general game mechanic and slight lore-based elements in order to produce a project that still works within my story however is also feasible within my time frame and without too many potholes within my working.

 I decided to remove the main human companion in the main game, as this would have taken too much time to code and animate with my current skills, so I have opted to have the main gameplay be focused around my one main character. This helps the gameplay to be more player-centric, and to help create a good atmosphere for players during the game. This also helps to create the lonely, isolated and alone feeling that many single player survival games try to create, such as Fallout 4 (2015) or Mad Max (2015).

So in order to complete my game fully I added the ability to move from the first tutorial level to the actual gameplay-based level via a door, however this door can only be accessed once you have removed all of the target dummies from the level by using your attack on them. This gives the player incentive to continue playing, and also helps to have the players understand the main gameplay mechanics.

[camno-college-blog]

Game Maker Production Diary

Listed above are the majority of the sprites that I currently have within my game, and for this blog post I will be discussing each area and why I have designed my sprites like they are, and how they work within my game.

 The first section are the tiles that I have created in order to create my buildings. I decided to create each tile for the walls and then the centre area of the roof separately, so that I can take these sprites, and arrange them in different ways for different buildings. I believe that this will create an interesting aesthetic that also helps to unify the art style within my game. I created these tiles within Piskel and then uploaded them within to Game Maker. After doing this I realised that a similar design could have been created directly within Game Maker, and as a result, this is what I switched to for the rest of my sprites past the grass tile.

  The grass tile is fairly unique in comparison to the rest of the sprites within my game as it is a tile that is copied multiple times in order to create the background for my game. For this I used a tutorial that I have referenced earlier in my blog and this helped to push my artistic creativity and knowledge to create a higher quality asset. The use of this tile is to help create a bright background that conveys happy and uplifting emotions, and this is why I created it with a brighter shade of green in mind, that doesn't look inherently realistic, however fits well with the kind of atmosphere I am trying to produce and also helps to structure the art style I am using within my game.

   The dirt tile was an early design for my grass, just with a colour palette change. This was to try and see how my original design would look with a different hue. For now, this sprite will not be featured in the level I am designing, and could potentially be used in a later level that calls for a darker colour scheme, while still retaining the idea of natural themes. The wooden roof tile is designed to add a bit of structure that the player is not able to move through. This teaches the player that some structures can't be moved through and this will help in later levels where these kind of buildings are prominent and affect the way that the game plays.

These sprites are sprites that are the main component of the gameplay, and as such have very specific names for what they are designed to do. For example, the 'Attack_DIRECTION' sprites indicate that they are designed to be the visual side of an attack, and it indicates in which direction is facing. This is useful while I am coding my characters so that I can easily tell which sprite that I need to use. The 'Dummy' sprite is a simple enemy, designed to be a target dummy. As I have decided to create an enemy that's designed to be used as a tutorial for the gameplay mechanics, this particular enemy is not heavily detailed, to show that it is just a shell that is not able to harm the player. This takes inspiration from the very first enemy that you meet in the game 'Undertale' (2015).

 One of the main issues that I have come across when designing elements within my game was the problem of creating sprites that accurately reflect the design that I want for my game. This comes from a general lack of artistic ability, and as such I spoke with various artists that are in my class as well as looking at different tutorials (Willis, 2017) on how to create the elements that I needed. This helped me progress and create something that I can consider to be similar to what I wanted to create in the beginning. While the sprites at the moment are not perfect, they do a good job of adding a visual aspect for the atmosphere that I wanted to create. Another issue that I came across was that, since I had never developed a top down game before, I didn't have any experience with creating certain aspects, such as attacks where the orientation is relative to the player. To work around this I created variables to represent the different directions that the player is facing, and then the attacks change sprite and direction based on which direction it faces in, using variables.

 Throughout this project I have compared my products to various other games that feature similar sprites in order to gain an idea of how my art style sets me apart from other games, and how I have taken influence from these games and their art. For example, one of the major elements that I spent time comparing was the grass tile I created. This tile appears in many games such as Minecraft (2011) and Stardew Valley (2016). These games are a big influence on my design due to their simple design and common conventions.

  If we compare the three different kinds of grass, it's clear to see that the Stardew Valley grass is the closest to my grass, however I looked to shades from Minecraft to see just how vibrant I should make my grass. This helped me structure how I wanted my grass to look and also made the production of these tiles easier as a result. If I were to do this again, I would follow other tutorials and try to deviate from the norm in order to get a more unique style.

[camno-college-blog]

Dark Souls Analysis

Dark fantasy, contains lots of dark, grey scale areas. Enemies are percieved in both visual aspects and in their vocal creation as not human. Fighting is very simple in the beginning, with a stamina bar that limits the player's attacks and complex movements. Always visible inventory and status bars rather than fading in and out constantly, creates a more structured HUD and a better built experience.

[camno-college-blog]

Soundtrack Production Diary: Vlog

https://youtu.be/G1mAnV73QVs