Dev Log 4

Project Back-Up - Final Evaluation

Written by Stephen, Jacob, Max.

As we completed our game or all we were able to achieve in the time period, we learnt a lot from the process. Firstly, we realised as we neared our deadline that we were far too ambitious with our game’s vision. The game would have needed a few more days to have been completed, something that could not have been done due to all our other college work. Going into the second year, we have all learnt the valuable lesson of assessing our time limit and making a game suitable for the deadline.

Despite our slight frustration knowing that our creative vision was not materialised, we were proud of the game world we achieved. I (Stephen) felt that my coding ability greatly improved due to the hours I put into the item inventory system, the key-coded door (which unfortunately wasn’t implemented but is accessible in the centre of the map), and having clean code (that is each in its separate class). I (Jacob) believe that my ability to create consistent and clean art for the game environment greatly improved, and am most proud of my progressing skills in lighting a scene. I (Max) felt that my ability to design levels has improved greatly, and I'm proud of the teamwork we were able to achieve.

Secondly, we have learnt that we should aim to have our project submitted an hour before the deadline. For this game, we left ourselves 20 minutes until the deadline. While we were still able to submit just in time, a last-minute error prevented saving the file as a WebGL build.

Finally, we felt that, while we may have done more than expected for the developer logs (as we created three YouTube videos for them), they allowed us to get an understanding of how to record, edit and script videos, as might be done in the industry (for independently released titles).

Overall we are proud of the work done (despite essentially creating a game that has only the element of exploration). More importantly, the things we have learned from this process and how we can grow from the experience. That’s all for this week from the team here at Matchboxes. Thanks for reading.