Evaluation of Project 1

I am actually kinda happy with my final product. It's definitely not the best game out there, but for my first game, it's great. In this blog, I will be talking about how I got to my final product and some of the compromises I had to take along the way. 

Time management

My time management throughout this project could have most certainly been better. I found myself rushing to get the product finished within the time limit due to numerous reasons. 

The first one has to do with myself, I was lazy at the beginning. One of my biggest problems is motivation and I didn't like the idea of making a 2d game, I wanted to get into the meat of things and go straight into the unreal engine and make a 3d game instead. This meant that my game took a while to take shape, but as it did it started to grow on me and as I drifted deeper into the code I started to love making it. 

However, this leads me to my next problem, getting carried away with one thing. I'm a really stubborn person and if I want something ill do anything I can to get it. Unfortunately, this costs me a large amount of time and I had to kick my ass into gear if I wanted to finish this project. 

Moving on from how I wasted time and how I had to spend time on things I couldn't control. My production schedule. In pre-production I started to develop my project schedule, I made it very simple as I didn't really know what I would be getting up to, you can see it here. This lead it to be very simple and honestly, useless. So throughout production, I didn't refer to it at all and because of this I often got carried away with what I was doing and used up too much time on it. 

Due to all of these reasons a lot of things in my game suffered, for example, some sprites never got developed such as the farmer's house and any bits of the story that I had planned I didn't have time to implement.

Communication with Staff and Others

One of the most helpful tools I have used is honestly, the game maker forms. Not only does it have every function listed, but it also has thousands of people helping each other with their problems. I found numerous post that has basically the same problem as me.

Another way we communicated at college was with demo days. Demo days are days dedicated to showing off your game and a chance to get constructive criticism from our mentors and peers. This was very useful as I got great feedback that helped me improved my game. To gather feedback we used a website called survey monkey. My survey can be seen here. 

But honestly, I've had the most help from just talking to peers such as Osborn. Just talking about our games has helped us develop ideas and improve game mechanics. This may have also eaten into our development times because sometimes we just started to help each other.

Actual Production and what I did Throughout.

My production like I said before was slow to get started, but once I started I couldn't stop developing it. firstly I had to make basic sprites so I could get the basic movement for my player. To do this I first used the drag and drop features to move and it wasn't very smooth in my opinion. So I looked up how to change the players X and Y which would make the player move. I found this function on the game maker forms which shows how to change the X and Y speed, here's the link. I further developed this movement code to this:

hspeed = walkingSpeed * (keyboard_check(ord('D')) - keyboard_check(ord('A')));

vspeed = walkingSpeed * (keyboard_check(ord('S')) - keyboard_check(ord('W')));

this basically changes the v and h speeds to be the walking speed depending if the other two = 1 (keyboard check come out as a boolean, so 1 or 0. that's how it can be used for mathematics) 

you can see that when you press W it takes it away, this is because game makers 0,0  is on the top left-hand side. 

Next, I thought that the player needed to be able to defend themselves before I added the enemies, so I started to develop the shooting system. So knowing what I do about the movement of the player I chose to try and develop the arrow by trying to get it to move toward the mouse using x  and v speed. I tried to do it like this for awhile but I couldn't get it to work but then look through the wiki again I found this. So I made the arrow spawn and in its create even I make it move towards the mouses X and Y. here's the code. 

The top line is the movement code, but the lower one is to change the image angle so it faces the correct way.


The next thing was the enemies. So again I made a basic sprite for the "wolf" and started to develop the movement of them. however, I didn't want them just too spawn and start attacking you, I wanted them to wonder about for while first and then when you get too closes they start to attack you.  I did this by using scrips and calling on them instead of using alarms(I understand python and that's just like the defining feature in that).

Anyway, to conclude, I will need to be more efficient with my time on the next project and make a better product schedule to help me stay on track.