This week, we were privileged to have a guest speaker, Jupiter Hadley, visit us and present the intricacies of the game industry, specifically branding and market dynamics. During the presentation, we exchanged words on game genres and the nuance between graphics and game style. We discussed camera angles and location and their impact on the players and the experience. We emphasized to Jupiter the importance of understanding what our target audience is after and what they seek and making our decisions based on that.
The lesson clearly showed the intricacy of promoting a game to a community. Enthusiasm and hype for a game launch are necessary, and this must involve a reasonable strategy that encompasses the right media outlets and publishers and engages social media sites appropriately. Jupiter highlighted that promotion is beyond the actual game and consists of crafting a tale that will capture the attention of prospective players.
As part of the coursework, our team was required to make an elevator pitch for our game. This exercise challenged us to summarize the concept of our game into a compelling narrative that would attract attention for a brief period and be effective quickly. I liked this element best as it challenged us to be imaginative and put our concept across in a way that would appeal to an audience.
After I had completed my objectives, I presented them to my team and received encouraging and positive feedback, which pushed me to get my work into digital shape for the next week. After studying other design programs, I spent my weekend studying Aseprite, one of the top pixel art programs. I desired my objects to be aesthetically pleasing but ideally integrated into the game’s appearance.
The first playtesting session was an eye-opening experience. We showcased our game to the class, focusing on our character movement, user interface compositions, audio effects, and musical scores we created. The feedback was enormously encouraging, particularly on the art style and the intriguing concepts we developed. However, we also realized we hadn’t been as effective as we wished, mainly due to insufficient playable output. This helped reinforce the role of further improvement despite our team putting in tremendous effort.
My class teacher, Sophie, encouraged me to lead and promote my group members to make our character art more appealing and exciting. She believed I could enable the team, and I realized that I would have to get to work for the next few weeks and prepare for our next playtesting.
Sadly, we had a lot of issues during that week. Our environmental designer was absent, and we ended up with incomplete backgrounds that didn’t meet our standards. Our character designer also could not deliver work to the same standard, and our technical designer faced problems within the game. Despite the issues, we had to work on teamwork and hard to deliver quality work. Another significant issue we had was pixel density inconsistency across our projects. Different members had different styles, and cohesion was missing. I ensured my objects had the same pixel density as the environment. I modified from a 32-pixel size to a 300-pixel size and recreated the objects painstakingly to establish visual cohesion within our game. We had to tackle this level to provide an immersive game experience.