Project 2: Evaluation

During the development of our game, me and Osborne designated different task for each other. I wanted to focus more on the gameplay were as Osborne wanted to do everything. This lead me to focus on the programming aspect of the unreal engine and I got lost in it and neglected the other parts of our project. I realised this quite late into our project when me and Osborne were talking on discord about our project.

This lead to Osborne making the city and all of the building, were as I made a few models in Fuse and brought them into unreal. Using fuse models meant we couldn't stick to the steampunk aesthetic that we had with our building. This was very annoying as it took the steampunk feeling away from the game and made it looks like there wasn't really a theme at all. But something that I did that looked really cool was reducing the saturation which made the city look quite dull and soulless, which would have played in well our planned narrative. (At the beginning of the game the game would be dull as you improved the area, it would get more colour.) 

Moving on to the gameplay, we were planning on having a few features in place by the end of it. A climbing, fighting and cover system. I had started to develop the climbing system built before production had begun at home in 1.8 to help me understand how it worked. In total, I think I spent over 40 hours troubleshooting and bug fixing this system. This lead to me having very little time to do much else. So I decided to make the AI. I use blackboards, behaviour trees e.c.t to make some "civilians" walk around. This took about 2 days to make. Then I moved on, with what I learned from the climbing system, to make a cover system. I underestimated how hard this would be to make and it took up more time then what I should have let it. With a few weeks left of production and a completely uncompiled game I knew what I had to do, I had to drop it from the game. In hindsight, I shouldn't have even started it, there wasn't enough time to make it to even a low standard. Never the less, I'm happy that I made this mistake now and I hope to learn from it and check my project timetable to keep on top of time in the future.

Next the sound. I'm really disappointed with our sound in the game. Don't get me wrong, Osborne did a great job with making the soundtrack, but due to our failure of time management, it affected this area the most. All that I did for this section, as I live close to a rural area, I got some sounds of trees swaying and birds singing. We decided to put that sound just outside of the big gates where there is a lot of trees.

Now time to look back on what we have done on this project. To say that I'm happy with the finished project would be lying. There are many things wrong with this project and they all come down to us being completely new to unreal, having little to no experience time keeping a project and unrealistic expectations. For my next project, I think I'm going to scale it down and try and keep it basic and use what I already have. (e.g. the climbing system)