Bren Warom-Bmet Games

Part 1 of Evaluation

My project theme was a side-scrolling plaform game, like Vectorman or Sonic the Hedgehog on the sega megadrive. My idea was developed from my previous 2d platform game project, I decided to develop the idea because in my previous project I only managed to finish my character and two platforms and I figured I could do alot more with the game in the fmp than I did in the 2D platform game project. I used alot of different reference images from art sites and games also went out to take pictures of the cathedral in Lichfield for observational drawing, I also got some walk cycles and flying cycles to help with my animation. The various different images I got off art sites helped me with my artist interpretations and my level design, it also helped me develop the animations for Ronex, I also was able to come up with the dash attack for the boss in the first level. All the research I did on animation made my animations alot more fluid and life like, also the research I did on anatomy helped me with the proportions of all my sprites. My research into construct has really helped to understand the program, my skills on construct have improved immensely since last project and also I feel that my drawing skills have improved slightly during this project, but in my opinion I think my photoshop painting is the thing that has Improved the most during this project. The art from American Mcgee'a Alice has been an inspiration for the art style of my game, alongside comic books and manga such as Spiderman, Eyesheild 21 and Pokemon. American Mcgee most likely uses photoshop and a drawing tablet, comic artist's would use copic markers and ink, manga artist's only use ink from what I know, I have seen a few manga that are in colour but those are few and far between. I mostly used a wacom tablet and photoshop to do all my design work, this is because photoshop helped me to make the sprites and animations quicker and more efficiently with lots of detail, I also used construct to build the game, because instead of having to all the coding yourself it has preset codes which you have to put in different events boxes and these event blocks basically powers your game, so you can do all the design work with little to no coding involved. I used the painting technique I learned from Shiam, to colour a lot of the different characters and platforms in my game, along with a lot of the concept art I did for the game. For construct I followed a tutorial on scirra which is the construct site and from that tutorial my knowledge of construct increased drastically and I figured out how to make the sprite separate from the platform behaviour, I needed to keep it separate because the animation seems to clash with the platform behaviour, so instead of putting it on the sprite I put it on a box and I set the sprite to got to the origin point every tick, so the sprite is bound to the box. I think all these different techniques and materials I used, made my game a lot better and it is now in playable state and I think all in all it now sort of resembles the game I had in mind. When I started the project I was planning two detailed levels with rpg elements and two bosses, as I went through the project realised that wasn't a realistic goal so I decided to do one level because I figured that it would be better to do one detailed level with a boss and enemies than to rushed levels with no bosses or enemies, I also changed who the first boss was because I realised that I had already made full concept art of character that I had already thought the characteristics, so I thought why not use him as the first boss. I probably should have done more researched into construct because I probably could have got a lot more of the game done if I did and also wished I had researched more into animation so I could have learnt to animate the background properly because my current animated background is legitimately hard to look at. The formal element of art I have used in my final piece are tone, shade, colour and shadow. The visual languages used in my game are animation and colour, The animation improves immersion in a game, it generally makes the game feel more alive, Colour is another thing that can add life to your game, people are more drawn to games that have interesting colour schemes and if your game is just full of bland lifeless colours not many people are going to want to play it. I used animation to make my bird enemies fly and I used a colour scheme that mostly consisted of purple and greys. I was trying to show that you were caught in the pull of a tornado, so I made the platforms slightly tilted to make it look like they are spinning round in the tornado. I think I was successful in conveying them, It does look like your scaling a tornado because of all the tilted platforms and the fact they are all bits of debris from houses, roads and parks. I'm happy with my final piece but I'm kinda sad that I didn't manage to do all that wanted to do, maybe if I started it sooner I could have done a bit more, but I'm still happy at how it turned out. My favourite part of my final piece has to be the enemies, I'm very proud about how they turned out because out of everything they work exactly how they are supposed to and I think the animation I did for them looks half way decent. I think I followed my proposal quite well, I just didn't have the time to finish it because I was very unrealistic at the beginning of the project. Since the start of the project I have consistently updated my blog and shown the progression of my project. I would wanted more time to finish because I wanted to put a few more enemies in the game.

Part 2 of Evaluation

I learned a new photoshop painting technique and how to use construct. I put all had learned from the previous projects and this project, to make my fmp final piece the best it could be, I used the painting technique I learned for the sprites, I learned how to efficiently use frames to create smooth animations and I learned alot about how to make a platform game on construct and through this I managed to make a decent game. The thing I did the best was definately the animation. Alot of the mistakes I made were in the event sheet in construct, things got glitched or just didn't work, so I needed to go back to the event sheet and fix it. If I could do something differently I would have spent a bit more time on my game and tweaked it a bit more. The sessions when we were learning about how to draw were the most helpful to me. We learnt a bunch of new ways to practise drawing hands from Shiam. I could use the techniques from all the drawing sessions to improve my own skills. One of my enemies wasn't working the way I wanted it to, but I eventually figured out that I needed to set the action variable to right, also I needed to make a scalable rope and the first tutorial I found didn't work, so I did a little and I finally found a tutorial that worked perfectly.