Evaluation

Here is an evaluation of how I believe the project went, I am going to consider which parts of the project went well and which parts didn’t, and why, and how I would improve next time.

Project Proposal

I believe that my project proposal was a success this is because I considered a range of events for the development of the game. For example I considered how long each task within the development would take, because of this we wouldn’t set ourselves unreachable milestones with in the short time that we had, I also planned counter measures in case our work wasn’t completed in time, such as doing work in most important to least, because of this if we did end up not finishing on time we would at least have the most important features of the game completed, and I also stated that if any work wasn’t completed they would have to be completed within our own time. I believe that the consideration I took for how long the project would take was good, this is because I prioritized updates and considered a reasonable time frame for the project which was important if we were going to finish on time. I also considered any problems that may arise during the development and considered ways to minimize the risk as well as solve any problems they may cause, such as having lots of saves and having them backed up, this minimized the chances that we’d lose work because of corruption. I believe this was a good idea for me to do in the proposal as because of this during development we had little to no problems with our work. I also reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the materials I would be using in my work, I believe this was important as it helped me consider what could go wrong with software and consider what I could do if these problems arise.

Because of how I conducted my project proposal I do not believe there are any changes or adjustments I could make to my proposal because of this I believe my proposal was successful, because of this if I were to create another in the future I would create one in the same way as I believe it was effective as it considered a lot of events for the project such as timing and problems.

Research 

I believe that the research that I conducted for the game was good, this is because I looked into a range of sources, such as numerous tower defence games as well as sources that included evolution, I also looked into the game ‘Age of War’ which is a tower defence game that has evolution involved, because of the range of sources I could find what elements that I could incorporated around the theme of growth and evolution as well as how tower defence games work and deconstruct them to find out which features of tower defence games are fun and that way I can try to add these to our game. This research helped me develop my ideas and consider features that I could use in our game to improve it, this research also showed me features that a tower defence always have because of this I knew which features I would have to include in our game to make sure its a tower defence game and to also meet players expectations of a tower defence game. So because of the range of sources that I used for my research and the inspiration that I got from the research I believe the research was successful, because I got inspirations for the game and found out key features of tower defence games and evolution, so because of everything I got from my research I believe it was successful so if I were to do some research again I would conduct it in the same way by looking into a range of games of the type I am trying to recreate and consider why the game is good, while also looking into the theme of the game research into sources that are based around it, this was I can get the most inspiration for the game for its genre and theme, and I don’t believe there is anything I could improve upon next time because I believe my research was in depth.

Idea Generation

For my idea generation I took aspects of my research and considered which parts of the tower defence games elements I liked as well as inspiration from growth and evolution, I used these to consider elements that could be great for our game, such as ideas for the games interface and how the player shall evolve.

To gather my ideas I also created a mind map that I considered the good and bad features of each of the tower defence games I conducted my research into and considered how I could use the features in our game to make it enjoyable for players, i also created a mind map for rewards that the player could by from the shop and I branched out into different areas that the shop could go into, I believe this was an effective way to gather ideas for the game as I could expand upon my ideas. I believe that this way of gathering ideas was a good method as it expanded my ideas and made me consider different ways the shop could expand which I didn’t consider before so because of this I believe this method was a good way of gathering ideas. I believe that I could however have created more mind maps to help me develop other ideas however I did create other ways of gathering ideas, so if I were to gather ideas for another project I would conduct a few more mind maps to help me with my ideas.

I also created sketches to help my idea development when creating my sketches I considered ways that the games I had research into created features and tried making them as similar as I could to my research, I believe this was a good idea as it helped me try to consider the ways that the games that I researched did each method and I tried to mimic them as I knew they were effective ways of doing features such as the shop menu, as I knew if I could create similar interfaces they would be effective and liked by players. Because I created sketches it was very easy to show players the ideas that I was considering and could ask them what they though of content, Because I created a few sketches for each idea I decided to poll the content to players to get their thought on content and find out which ideas they liked more. Because of this method that I used of sketches to gather ideas and create similar features for our game It was very easy for me to poll the content to gather more ideas and to get player feedback I believe this was a good method of gathering ideas as I could directly get players feedback towards content and make any adjustment from their feedback, so because of how I could get player feedback for content to find out if players would like or hate content before its been produced it meant that i could make any changes to the idea before creating it which may have ended up wasting development time which wouldn’t have been good for the game. If I were to create more sketches for another project I would consider creating more sketches than what I did for this project as they were an effective way of gathering ideas as well as getting player feedback on content.

Another method I used to gather ideas as well as feedback was by creating surveys, with these I asked players questions to which I got responses from these I got some ideas into how I could improve the game such as making the screen shake feature more noticeable which would help me improve the game. I believe that this method could have been better for example if I would have structured the questions better and not let players answer lazily I would have gotten more in depth responses which would have been more useful for my games development, however I did find out that players enjoyed the game. They are changes that I would make next time if I did a project like this.

Project Management

I believe our project management was very effective, this is because we considered how long each task would take and created a reasonable gant chart that had a time table to how long we expected each task to take, I believe this was important and effective because it meant we could consider how long our work would take and make sure that everything would be completed on time, I believe that we could have expanded on the gant chart to include more work that we produced as time went on such as changes made from player feedback.

I believe that we distributed work with in our good effectively as because we each were working on our own areas we could combine our work to produce content quicker for the game for example Tyler creating sprites for the enemies,Sam coding the movement of the enemies and me coding the enemies health, because of this areas of the game were developed quickly and effectively, because of this if I were going to work in a group again I would work like this again as I believe it was an effectively way to produce work for the game, I can’t think of anyways I could improve upon this for another project.

I also produced weekly evaluations for the game, with these I considered what was good and bad about the game I also planned what I was going to do the following week before the following week started, I believe this was effective way to gather ideas for changes that should be made to the game, I also think it was a good idea that I knew what I was doing the following week as it meant I could consider Ideas I could create in the game, it also made sure that I knew was I was doing at any point of development as I didn’t have to think about what needed doing and could start working on content immediately, I believe this was an effective way to structure what I would be working on the game as it allowed me to think about what I can do for content before I start working on it and because of the gant chat as well I also knew exactly what I would be doing at any point during the week, which was useful to save time so we could meet the deadline, Because this was successful in helping me reach the deadline if I were to do another project I would plan what I am doing each week before the week starts so I know exactly what I’m doing so I can produce more work as well as think off better ideas while I have the weekend to think about the content.

Use of Materials

Because that we as a team are used to working on game we decided that it would a good idea to continue using game maker as we have experience using it which would mean that we could save development time as we could use transferable coding from previous games into this one as well as spending less times using tutorials as we would already know some coding. I believe this was a good idea for us to do as we saved a lot of time by quickly adding coding that we already knew and because we were used to the language of game maker we didn’t have much new to learn, because of this if I were to create another game I would use game maker again as now I have even more knowledge on game maker and so using it again would be even more useful for our game.

I created some of my working using pen and paper to create sketches and polls, I decided that using pen and paper would be easier to create the ideas that I was thinking off for the sketches, as I am better at creating images on pen and paper than Photoshop; it also presented a much quicker and easier way to poll players as it didn’t require sending links which puts some people off doing polls, also because I had the work on paper I could scan them into the computer, this way I had two copies of the work, this way if anything would happen to either the online file or the one on paper I would still have the other one. I believe this was a good method of creating work as it gave me more ways to back up the files as I could have a copy on paper and the computer, also because the sketches and polls would be easier on paper than a pc as it made gathering players feedback extremely easy, because of this I would strongly consider using this method again if I were to create a similar project, this is because I believe it was a more practical way of getting feedback on a range of topics.

The game

I believe the game was successful, this is because we all achieved everything that we originally planned on creating for the game for the deadline, we also enjoyed the game, and we also we achieved the goal that the players would like the game as my feedback has shown that players has enjoyed the game which is what we hoped to accomplish with the game. I believe the game could have some improvements made to it such as adding more levels to the game, adding more features to the shop and having more verity of enemies, this is something that I would have liked to add to the game and if I could repeat the project I would also spend less time on content that didn’t make the cut as this made the content a waste of development time which could have been spent on the above features to improve the game.

I believe that I produced good work for the game such as the shop and bug fixes over the weeks, I believe this because the players said that they liked the shop as well as other features that I created, I believe it was a good idea to follow tutorials while producing work for the game, this is because the tutorials helped speed up the development of the features while also limiting chances of bugs arising later in development, because of how effective the tutorials were I would use tutorials again if I were to work on another game, as they save development time and work.

I believe it was a good idea for me to constantly ask for player feedback for content for the game as because of feedback I could create updates that I knew players would like before starting because they said they wanted it in the game, because of this there were less chances of me producing work that would be disliked and later removed from the game which wouldn’t have been healthy for the games development as it would have caused me to waste a lot of development time, I believe that I maybe could have gotten more player feedback on some areas of the game such as shop prices in the game, however I still believe the feedback I got for content was very useful for the games development, because of this if I were to do a similar project again I would try and get as much player feedback as I did in this project to make sure that no development time is wasted and to make sure that players would like the game as that was our main end goal for the end of the project, which as my surveys showed players liked the game.

There were some parts of the game that didn’t go so well, for example the inventory system had to be scrapped during development because of errors and problems it caused, however I did learn from the experience of creating the system, if I were to create it again for another project I would make sure I followed a tutorial to make sure that I didn’t waste any development time by later having to remove the system from the game or having to spend a lot of time fixing errors, as when watching tutorials often lowers the chances of problems with content.

End results

I believe that the game was a success because I myself enjoyed the game and so did the players who were testing the game thought the development, I believe the game was successful because of a few reasons, such as the gant chart that we created for the project was very effective in making sure that we kept on track for the deadline, I also asked for player feedback on content often to make sure that the content we were working on was always what players wanted in the game, and lastly I believe it was successful because of what players said in the survey. The content that I liked most about the game was working on the shop this is because there was a range of areas of rewards that I could go into, I also liked the rewards that were produced that the players could buy such as the X3 damage which was very effective when taking out the boss.

There are a few features that I would have liked to expand upon on the game such as adding a turret to the shop that has a chance of shooting a freezing bullet that would cause 1 enemy to freeze for about 3 seconds which I would have created by making the enemy object get replace by one that doesn’t have the moment variables and after 3 seconds would switch back into the original object, chances like these wouldn’t require too much time to develop and I would have liked to add if there we had more development time, However I still am happy with the outcome of the game.

Blog Posts

I believe that the blog was successful this is because of my research and previous experience with posting on blogs helped me in structuring the blog such as posting often and in a professional form, which I believe made the blog successful, I believe the choice of posting on a blog over working in a work book was a good idea as people over the world could view our blog and comment, like or follow our posts; because our blog has gotten likes and follows from people over the world it shows that people liked our posts so much they wanted to keep up to date with them, because of this we knew that what we were producing was liked by people so we knew we were producing updates that players liked.

Our blog was also useful in presenting how our work had developed over time as viewers could scroll down the page and see how the game was progressing over time I believe this was a useful part of our blog as it allowed viewers to see how our game had developed over time and where it was heading. One slight problem we had with our blog is some posts were posted a bit later than they should have, however this wasn’t a huge issue with the blog and so because of this I would use a blog on another project as it was an effective way to show our games progression to the players and was popular with followers.

GameJolt

I believe it was a good idea for us to post our game on the online gaming website GameJolt this is because the website can be seen from people all over the world; this allowed our game to get more views, also because strangers can easily find the game it allowed us to get feedback on the game, and  because the people are strangers they are less likely to lie to make us feel good about the game which makes their opinions more useful than those from friends who could lie about what they think about the game.

Next time I would upload the game earlier as we posted the game a bit later than what we should have to make sure the game had more updates, I believe we should have instead had a disclaimer informing players that it was in very early stages of development and feedback was welcome. Next time I would also post the game on the itch.io gaming website as this would have allowed our game to get more views and so we could have gotten more feedback on the game which may have helped in the game’s development.

Outcomes

I believe that we successfully kept with the theme of evolution and growth that we had set ourselves as the game is hugely based around this theme, the game also maintains most of the features that you would expect to find in a tower defenece game; because our game stuck with these themes as much as we could I believe the game successfully meant this goal that we have set.

Another one of our out comes was for the game to be liked by developers and players a like; considering the results I got from my surveys and play tests I would say that players enjoyed the game.

Changes for Next time

I would try and find a more effective way of transferring code in game maker as we had to manually copy and paste coding, and I believe there will be a better way of doing this, this would have saved us time which we could have used for developing the game.

I would consider if mechanics would suit the game more and also follow more tutorials for content that I’m unsure how to code, this way I can minimize the chances of the game being removed either because they aren’t working correctly or not suiting the game.