I wont lie, the first two projects that I worked on by myself this trimester weren't great. I honestly didn't feel good about the ideas and I found it really hard to get motivated to do them, especially considering I am not a great programmer and it would take me a lot longer to work on them. I think those two things factored together, the low amount of self esteem due to the ideas and also the inability to create them myself without putting in a lot of effort lead to the end product being quite bad. I feel like the final project is proof of that. As I believe I have shown, in the third project I put in a lot more effort and I felt a lot happier with my contributions, ideas, and leadership skills than I have in any project before. This was largely due to the pressure being a lot less serious due to having excellent programmers on my team. I found it easier to express my creativity when I had people who were able to back me up and confirm that my ideas were good and also to help drive them in ways that were possible to do in the time constraints.
What I have learned this trimester
This trimester I have learned a lot about design and a lot of other aspects of making a game. One thing I've learned
Making particle effects look nice is hard. I spent hours at the beginning of the third and second project messing with particles in the games and trying to make them look good. After a while they started turning out really good. (I think at least.) As you can see below, the smoke particles look pretty cool and I'm pretty proud of how they turned out.
3D modelling is another thing I've learned this term. I spent a fair amount of time going over 3ds max tutorials and although I have a lot to learn in that department I am far better with that program than I was before the term started which I think is a success.
Optimising a game is important. When I started this term I just assumed that optimisation wasn't important due to us creating small games. Boy was I wrong. Our game was lagging on highest graphics very early into the project due to the particle effects around the world. We had to go in and separately modify all particle generators around the world and make sure they weren't going to create spikes in fps.
Source control. This term I ventured from my safehaven that was GitHub and started using BitBucket which is far more complicated. Rather than using a single program to manage our repository we were using a couple. The programmers were using a particularly complicated one whilst I was stuck using SourceTree. More than once had object files or even the entire scene disappeared on me and I had to revert the game to a previous version to avoid losing somebody's work. I feel this is a very important thing to learn in this field of work.
Finally I learned not to get too attached to your work. Sure, be proud of it but also be aware that it may not help the game achieve its goal. If the goal of the game is trust, how exactly is adding a bunch of features to buildings to make them look prettier help the game? I spent a few hours working on how buildings looked and after a while I realised that when playing the game it looked very distracting and I felt like it would stop the player from experiencing the game how we wanted them to. (The trust mechanics would have been overshadowed.) Also, source control messes up and deletes things sometimes and you may have to redo things.
What I have learned about my own practice during this trimester.
One of the main things I've learned this trimester is that I work far better in a group than I do by myself. I enjoy leading a team and putting a product together, it's the kind of person I am. In a way, I am good at organising other people but not so good at organising myself. (Which I am working on.) I feel like in a way this is similar to how I am good at puzzles, but not creating puzzles. I feel like the final project was kind of like a puzzle, with lots of pieces missing and being created, and I slowly had to put it together as more pieces were appearing. I may not be the best at programming or able to create audio for the game, (although I did find a lot we were able to use,) I am able to bring these assets together to create a, (what I'd say is,) successful experience. (Although perhaps somewhat irrelevant to trust.)
I've also learned that spending far more time researching and thinking of ideas for games is a lot more important than I originally thought. If you really put the effort into thinking of a good idea, a lot of the other important things like self and team motivation, support and even more ideas will come naturally. It's easy to grow an idea from an idea that is already good.
Another thing I feel like I've learned is that time management is probably the most important aspect of games design. Setting up an effective time management chart for the project is very important even if you don't stick to it. It is good for everyone to have an understanding of how long tasks are going to take and also so they understand the scope of the project at hand.
The final primary thing I learned about design this term would be communication. Communication is key when collaborating with people, especially if they aren't in your class, (or in the real world, I suppose that'd be the same as not working at the same place.) The gantt chart is a very important aspect and making sure that everyone has access to the documentation, especially the design document, is essential. Next time I would make sure that our team has group meetings.
What I am going to do to improve next trimester.
Next trimester I am going to improve on everything.
I am going to be more organised, I will do this by creating a better schedule, at the moment my schedule is okay but it isn't very in depth and I've been very poor at making sure I follow it. I need to work out a system that will help me follow my schedule constantly.
I will be far more motivated. I will achieve this by making sure that I spent lots of time on my concepts for my games so that I am motivated to make them, and on the off chance that I'm unable to do this, I will find ways to make myself more motivated to complete tasks. I will treat it like it is my job rather than I am in a classroom.
I will get ahead of briefs and make sure that my work is mapped out properly so I know what needs doing and when. This goes for group work also and ties in with the gantt chart work I mentioned earlier.
I will improve on my attendance which I actually feel like I've succeeded in doing this term. I have successfully come to class about 95% of the time between half way through the trimester and now. I only missed one day. Unfortunately I haven't always been here on time which is largely due to the bus timetable, but I know that isn't an excuse and I need to get up earlier to compensate for potential traffic.
Where I fit on the grade scale overall.
Overall I feel like the first and second assignment were passes. They may not have been pretty but I feel the concepts I was going for were decent. I just think my execution could have been far, far better, but I did put some effort in. It's not like I sat around doing nothing during these days, I did work on these games and I worked quite hard too, I just didn't have any emotion behind it. No pun intended.
That being said, I feel my final game I did far better and honestly I'd say I probably a distinction based on the effort I put in. Not a high distinction although I really did put that much effort in, unfortunately the game didn't represent trust correctly. I made mistakes but the good thing is I've learned from most if not all of them. I also feel like I did a really good job organising our group and keeping everyone on track by making sure people were motivated, knew what their jobs were and also bringing all the pieces together to make a pretty nice looking game. Overall I'd say my grade is a credit or a pass, somewhere in between. Although I did make up for a lot of mistakes I'd made in the first half of the term on the last project, that is still 2 projects where I could have done much better on.
Thanks for reading / listening.
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