For my final blog post, I want to reflect on my focuses for this project from the first couple of weeks, to see how I did. For each point, I will go through what I did for that focus area, and what could I improve on next time.
Major Focuses
- Programming
- Improving research Skills
- Visiting places of interest
- Going to the library more often for research
- Research using the internet
There wasn’t a significant degree of programming done for this project, which is unusual as it is one of my key strengths in the field of game development. I did try to make a prototype but progress on that was very slow and I wasn’t able to get it even halfway done by the end of the deadline.
Another thing I also didn’t do for this project was visit places of interest. This makes some sense, the nearest theme parks near me would have taken some amount of traveling each way, and so it wasn’t as feasible as I thought it would have been.
I also tried to utilize the library more for my research, I took out books related to theme parks, I searched the library online for resources, and I got DVD movies with robots in it. However, I didn’t look at much of this material. I couldn’t keep focus on a documentary from CNN I found from the library, it was business related and not what I was looking for. I did use the library online to look for articles online on theme parks, and I read slightly more of that than the other material, but it wasn’t much. Once again it was business related and didn’t keep my attention for very long because it wasn’t that useful for my purposes.
One thing that was helpful, however, was looking at games that were related to my games idea. For example, Theme Park, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Thrillville: Off The Rails for the theme park aspects, and the Bloons TD series for the Tower Defense aspect. This helped give me a better understanding of the genres I’m looking to emulate.
If I was to do this project again, I would try to find less academic resources that I would not use that much anyway, and I would play more games that align with the project and its goals.
Minor Focuses
- Game Design
- Improving Art Skills
- Illustration/Drawing
- Adobe Illustrator
- Character Creation
For game design, I ended up writing a Game Design Document for a genre I had not thought about making before, the Tower Defense genre. This was a genre in which I had no familiarity with, and so I played a couple of games within the genre. Primarily the Bloons TD series of games, and within that particularly 5 and 6, I also looked at a few Flash based games such as Vector TD, and I also tried games in the genre for mobile devices. In the end however, what I ended up with wasn’t particularly special. It was, at times, hard to talk to people about my idea, especially with the line ‘use theme park rides to destroy robots.’ I can understand now how that might be an abstract idea thats hard to picture. If I was to do this idea again, I would choose an idea thats more down-to-earth and easier to understand.
In terms of improving my art skills, I don’t think there was much in the way of improving my drawing skills, and the work I did on gathering references was something I have done before, but I did discover a new method of iteration for character design, sending it to people, gathering feedback and making changes based on that feedback. As seen in Researching Characters, this helped my character evolve into one that looks like a deadly robot, rather than what I originally had, which looked cute.
For Adobe Illustrator, I learned how to use the pen tool for creating shapes, rather than just using the basic box, circle shape tool as I had done in the past for Illustrator. This was one of my major focuses this time around but I had left it fairly late, and so I didn’t get it done until the last few weeks of the project.
As for character creation, in addition to what I mentioned above with the character iteration process, I learned that there was a shape method for designing characters, which was something I wasn’t aware of before. In addition, I am one step closer to developing characters based on the Mixels art style. I wasn’t able to get it entirely there by the end with the robot design, but I am satisfied with what I did end up making, and the progress I’ve made towards this goal.
If I were to do the art side of this project again, I would have started with some aspects of the artwork earlier in the process, such as working in Illustrator, that way, I could better achieve the art goals I had.