Post Production

Illustrated evaluation

I am going to write an illustrated evaluation that covers my time management and communication with staff and peers, in this I am going to refer not only to my blog but what I did and when . I am going to explain how useful my production schedule was, what aspects of production took longer than expected, how I stayed on track, what problem solving strategies I employed, how did I seek support and feedback from others and what I needed in my schedule to make it more effective.

Firstly I made a simple production schedule, to give me more freedom to do wat I wanted when I wanted, this however changed with the level design I made at the beginning which I quickly used as an production schedule in the first few levels I made my level design have an object collision to add instances like music, health and general sound effects using these drawings as a production schedule not only made my game intense but it also made me quickly progress through the first part of my game. The second part of my game had the same effect even though it had a lot more content to work with and using the drawings of the levels made the creation of the rooms much simpler.

In my production schedule I added in making story boards to my game, however they ended up having the same effect as my level design as they took the role that the schedule had with what I needed to include in each level to make the game a much better and full of life.

When I first started this task to create a game I expected to have some setbacks since I was using a 3D coding system on a 2D engine however I did not expect to have such a massive amount of setbacks from: game crashes, sound not working, working around how to use my sprites in my game, compile errors that where not clear in debug where they were. Firstly one of the major setbacks I had which made me lose 2 weeks’ worth of work was when game-maker decided to make all my saves an illegal path and make me unable to open them to solve this I simple had to  do all the work again. Then the sound which was a persistent problem from day one that I solved only a few days ago by changing a lot of features for one changing all of my sound files from wav to mp3 then setting them up as 3d sound files to play in my game.  Then changing all the necessary sprites like background objects, wall, ceiling and floor sprites and the monster sprite to render in 3d so that it appears in my game correctly. thirdly the debug of my game which even though took a large amount of uncalculated time to solve all the bugs it was worth it in the end as I got the game which I not only promised I would make but also pleased with to a certain extent.

Finally there where minor problems which I accounted for like the movement not working entirely like I want and the look of the game differing from my original thought however I could not foresee the idea that the 3D rendered game couldn’t run alongside any 2D room without major problems solving this made me lose days which I had to catch up on by constantly working on my game for 46 hours.

To stay on track I had to use the game maker at home along with scheduling extra time to work on my game and in the end I had to do a time crunch which was 46 hours to complete my game. I also used my storyboards and level design as steps for each part of my game this helped my greatly stay on track.

I also had to use a lot of problem solving strategies like: using trial and error on my coding, using a combination of video tutorials and forums to help solve some issues I had and finally getting support from class mates and using survey monkey. Firstly I had to constantly use trial and error to find out what code would not only work on my game but work to help improve it this took the longest out of all my strategies because like I game tester I had to constantly do the same thing over and over again until something worked. Secondly I used a combination of video tutorials like [game maker tutorial] simple 3D dungeon and game maker tutorial – 3D games to help code my game and many forums which had the same or similar issues I had that could help solve them. Finally I also got support from class mates who were using coding and could see something that I couldn’t and using the survey monkey to get ideas on how to improve my game.

In conclusion for my next production schedule I will make sure I have contingency planning in case something goes wrong or a problem I am trying to solve takes longer than anticipated and technical issues that are out of my hands. I would have a real time update to see how much time I have gained or lost when doing a peace of the project, and to achieve all of these instead of using word I am going to use excel which will allow me to use these features. 

PowerPoint presentation of 5 things 

A5 Flyer

video of my game