Reflection

Looking back on this project overall, I am very proud of the outcome, however, there are a number of things that I would like to have added, to improve upon the over gameplay, it if I had had the time. At the beginning of this project, I wanted to create a complete fully functioning game. I realize now upon completing it that the due to the sheer amount of work that it takes to make even a demo, it would not have been realistic for me to have made an entire game in the allocated time. With an entire team behind me made up of different professionals taking on different tasks it might have been possible, such as having a separate animator, coder, and researcher. However, because I took on all of the major roles myself, that normally, in an industry circumstance, would be split up into separate roles I had to learn to multitask throughout the entire process. Despite this, I have achieved the majority of my goals and have created a fully functioning demo of a game.

Taking into account feedback and my own personal opinion there are a number of features that I would have liked to have added/changed if I had had the time. Overall I am really happy with the level of research I was able to do prior to developing the game. Visiting the London Trasport Museum was a really valuable experience as they had a lot of exhibitions and models of trains that I could look at for inspiration when it came to texturing and modeling assets. The museum also gave me a lot of information that I could implement into the narrative of the game. I do however wish that I was able to go into even more detail on some of the tunnel segments as far as the history goes. For example, the escalator platform that represents the period of 1910 to the 1930s is a lot more empty than the other platforms. This is because I struggled to find models that would fit within the theme of the platform and also the Underground platforms themselves in real life do not have a lot of stuff on them for health and safety issues to provide room travelers. I didn’t want to add loads of unnecessary models to the platform to fill up space because realistically underground platforms are pretty empty. Ideally, I would have modeled a lot of the assets myself so that they looked exactly the way that I wanted them however due to time constraints I did not have time to make everything myself. Also for generic assets such as barrels, crates etc, it seemed unnecessary to model my own when there were perfectly good free models on TurboSquid. However, when selecting models off of TurboSquid I made sure to check that they were all royalty free, and then the majority of them I retextured myself to make them fit in with my desired theme.

Technically I faced a lot of problems when coding the game. For example getting the character to climb up onto the platform and jump off the platform using the arrow keys was particularly tricky. This was due to the animations I created as they were not ‘treadmill’ animations like the walking and running animations. This meant that when the animations played they moved the character in 3D space however her actual transform position had not changed causing her to move back to her original position on completion of the animation. This was an issue as it meant that I would have to change her transform position manually with code causing a slight glitch/flicker in her transitions due to a slight delay on her offset, caused by not being able to keep up with the movement. Sadly I was unable to find a solution to fix this issue so if I was able to go back and redo it I would make her climb and jump animations a treadmill animation, like the walking and running, then I could move her slowly to the position that I wanted without the glitch. I also had a problem with the real-time update on the lighting and when the character passed underneath a light source it caused the light to flicker, this was another problem I was unable to fix however the effect was not too much of a problem as it sometimes looked like it was supposed to flicker like that in some sort of eerie way.

Another issue that I discovered was after importing all of the audio into the game. The audio was called to play at certain points in the code of the game within either the interactions with the artifacts or when the player entered a specific collider positioned in the game. However, I soon discovered that when running through the tunnels some of the audio clips were so long that the character had already reached another audio point before the previous one had finished. This caused some overlapping and clashing of audio clips. This was in issue because if the player missed the end of one of the audio clips then they were not getting the full context of that particular section of the game. To try and help prevent this we had to cut down a considerable amount of the audio so there is a lot of audio that did not make it into the game at all. The only other thing that I could do to try and prevent audio clashing was disabling the run feature however, this feature was particularly useful when building/evaluating as it was quicker to get through to sections that I needed to look at. I decided in the end that I would keep the feature in but I wouldn’t draw any of the player’s attention to it. In the beginning of the game, there is a GUI (Graphical user interface) image that tells the player that to move they must use the arrow keys however I specifically chose not to include the ‘hold shift to run’ image as to try and encourage the player to walk from one station to the next instead. Minimizing the chances of overlapping audio. Another option might be to give her some sort of stamina/energy bar so that she can only run for a short amount of time before she grows tired and reverts back to walking. I think there could be a lot more improvements made to the GUI itself if I had had the time to fully implement them. Coming up with a way to symbolize an inventory/map system in a small space was probably the biggest development challenge that I faced as I wasn’t sure what would be the best way to do it. Originally I wanted to create some sort of map that they player could open up and see where they had to go to collect each item however due to the smaller scale of the game demo it seemed unnecessary to create a full on map, instead I created a sort of mini map/inventory system at the top to track where the player roughly was in the timeline and if they had picked up an item or not. However, the inventory isn’t very clear and isn’t the best quality and could benefit from a more visual indication of exactly where the player is in the timeline.

I really like the overall aesthetic of the project. It was really fun for me to do as it is a completely different design style than what I am used to. I enjoyed the 2.5D element and experimenting with different depths and dimensions and I really like the dramatic contrast between the player the background. I think the quality does slightly slip in places, for example, I had a couple problems with glitching/flickering ‘decals’ when the character walked past them. There are also a number of models that I would like to have retextured in a higher quality and spent more time on the look of the overall platforms. I struggled a lot with the ending of the game as I wasn’t sure of the best way to end a demo of the game. In light of this, I should have done some research on game demos in general, looking into how long they normally are and how they end. In the end, I chose to just end the game with you completing ‘Level One’ with the idea that in the full-length game it would then follow on there to ‘Level Two’, if I could do it again I would make the ending less abrupt and the level one complete end screen comes on quite suddenly with no prior warning and information about what happens at the end. I do also wish that I had been able to get more audience feedback from a variety of people playing the game instead of just some students that I know, however, I posted my game on a couple forums and haven’t received any feedback at this present time so was unable to include it.  I also really enjoyed working in a small group as I was able to bounce ideas off of my partner and because we had very clear roles within the project were able to work separately but also together. It is a shame that my partner wasn’t able to put all of the audio into the game himself however, it would have taken a lot longer as he has little coding experience and no knowledge of how to operate Unity. So in the end, we decided it would be less time consuming if I put all the audio in. With a little more time management and research, I could have improved some aspects of the game. However, Overall I am really happy that I came out the other side of this project with a fully working demo and I believe that this project has advanced my skills in coding immensely and has also improved some newer 3D skills such as modeling, animating and texturing.