the following is the final evaluation I wrote after completing the Final Major Project version of Week in Maple Valley, with specific names censored for now. This may or may not change.
For the FMP assignment the brief was to create any kind of game we wanted to make, so for mine I wanted to make one of my personal projects. I wanted to pick something that would be simple to execute but was also enjoyable to work on, played into my current strengths and was something I could put a large amount of passion into without burning myself out. In my free time I create design documents for games I want to eventually make so there wasn’t a lack of options, but what ideas were there ranged from loose ideas that would take several weeks to flesh out, or grand multi-year projects that exceed my current skills level. So, I narrowed it down to three game ideas, Gunslinger R.E.D, Yo! Yo! Radical!, and Life in Maple Valley. Thankfully when I was deciding which to do it was careers week, so I was able to ask one of the speakers, Mark Baldwin, who I showed the concepts to and asked for feedback to which he said that Life in Maple Valley had both great potential and a market of people who want a game like it, so it was decided that it would be what I’d do for my FMP.
The first part of the project was creating a design document for the project as well as a statement of intent to give to the tutors so they could give feedback and veto any unachievable or just bad ideas. This part of the process was much simpler for me as I already had a semi complete design document and a clear idea of what I wanted to create, so all I needed to do was finish the document and reformat the ideas into a statement of intent. A part of that was choosing a specialism, as in which part of game development to focus on, this was kind of tough for me as I wanted to create a full demo for my idea, meaning I wanted to tackle all three specialisms, I felt this way because for all my previous projects stretching back to Level 2 I’ve never made a complete game, and because this is going to be the Final Major Project (and possibly the last thing I make while at COLLEGE NAME) I wanted to make something complete. Not out of over ambition but because I wanted to prove to myself I could do it, that I could create a complete experience in a given time frame and to prove I can make video games. Obviously, that was shot down by my tutors and they told me to focus on art, so I followed their advice and put much of my focus on the art... while also trying to make a complete demo because I have a problem.
This part was one I was very excited for. Given that planning has been described as my strongest skill and creating visually appealing plans is something I find quite fun, I quickly got to work in notion. The blank template for projects (which I made) consists of a small description of the project, the skills I want to gain from doing it, the deadline and a Trello like task board with task categories already added. This was going to be the first real project I've made using this template, and as such I wanted to test what’s limits were and add on features and fix what was needed. For example, I didn’t have a research category, nor did I have an easy way to find and reexamine the research I had gathered so I added that to the system, including an area to store tutorials and take notes on them. I also experimented with adding dates to the system, as in giving individual tasks deadlines to encourage me to finish tasks on time before things got out of hand, this didn’t go exactly as planned but I’ll get to that later. A lot of the planning at the start was trying to predict tasks and problems I may have and creating micro templates to solve them as well as writing down the tasks I knew I had to do. Also, during this time, I created a second design document detailing what I needed to have to create a minimum viable product (MVP) which would be a guide for what I needed to make and what needed to be prioritized. The project’s notion board grew and evolved over the course of making the game and now that we’ve reached the deadline, I can make some critiques of my system.
The FMP’s notion board is a bit of a mess visually, since a lot of the features I added over the weeks I kind of just tacked onto the bottom, also because of how I designed the To-do system, all unfinished tasks are visible, meaning you have to scroll past a long list of tasks before you see the second half of the board. I could probably fix this by having a more condensed view of the tasks but that would probably require a fresh start as I’d also want to implement a priority system as part of it. Another problem with the current system has to do with how I wrote them down, quite a few of the tasks were very broad and or vague so they would just sit on the list empty and taking up space. The solution would be to break those down further into small defined tasks but then that runs into the problem of all these small problems being on the board in this incredibly long list which will inevitably end with me being overwhelmed. The solution to this being of course to redesign the task board with two things, one, the previously mentioned priority system, and two, additional “To-do” categories, in the current system there is only one, that being “not started” but if I find a way to break that into multiple parts I may be able to make the workload appear as being smaller by segmenting it. Moving on to the topic of adding dates to tasks, the results were mixed, on the one hand it encouraged me to figure out an order of events, but due to circumstances out of my control (which I will discuss later) I ended up falling behind my previously made timeline which ended up feeding into a negative feedback loop stopping me from doing specific tasks. Looking back on how I felt over the project and how I feel now, I’m probably going to scrap giving every individual task its own date to be completed and instead set milestones where a broad range of tasks should be done by the deadline. The reasoning being that due to how my brain works I tend to rapidly change between tasks and interests, this new system will encourage that style of work as opposed to the previous style which punished that. Along with that I should probably pivot to doing weekly checkups on the tasks list whilst doing the weekly reflections so I can catch problem that may happen due to me setting unrealistic deadlines for myself. Something I introduced to the notion board near the end of the project was a daily task system, I liked this because it encouraged me to pick one thing to focus on and do for that day which resulted in getting work done more frequently, of course near the end I messed this up by putting too many tasks in one day resulting in it having the problems the deadlines had of just hanging around and making me feel bad, but that can be easily fixed by one, setting a maximum number of tasks I can write down, and two, having daily tasks be removed from view when the day is over. Overall, the notion board I’ve made has been helpful, and the problems I do have with it can be fixed. If I didn’t have this system, I would have done much less work and would have been much more stressed.
For this project I knew what I wanted, so finding sources for my research was far easier than previous projects. I gathered a large amount of reference images for both character design and environment and 3D model designs as well as a small collection of YouTube videos and GDC talks about different topics relating to the genre of game I was making, I also investigated different visual novels and light-hearted, comedy-based games. The big problem I kept running into was forgetting the research whilst in the creative process. I would do the work and struggle with design while I had a large amount of inspirational material being unused and forgotten. What I’ve learned from this is that I need to make the research I gather much easier to find. I’ll most likely fix this by giving my current system an overhaul and making research easier to view, I also need to get into the habit of pulling up references before I start creating. Something I’ve yet to mention is that early in the project I did a survey asking feedback on my character designs for the main cast. If I can be perfectly honest, I don’t really trust the opinions of my colleagues, so I’ve taken their feedback with about a bucket's worth of salt.
Here comes the fun part, talking about what I made over the course of this project, I’m unable to go too deep into detail because when I work, I enter a flow state where I don’t really remember why I do certain things and several hours pass without me realising. What I can tell you about though is why my work output was as low as it ended up being. During the past few months, I was getting tired much more easily and sleep was restoring less and less energy. By the time we were a third of the way through the project my body was barely holding itself together, I’d collapse into bed the second I got home, and I'd lose focus during class as body was concentrating on staying awake. So, after convincing my mum to send me to the GP and after a blood test, we finally had the reason. That being my vitamin D levels were extremely low (which is what I assumed the cause of this was) and I was quickly put on vitamin D supplements which at the time of writing, I’m halfway through the provided meds and my energy has slowly been returning. I’m not at 100% yet, but I’m at a good 60 to 70%. Anyway, back on topic, I’ll try to describe my general process for creating art, but it may not be as detailed as possible nor will it be the best way to go about making things, it’s my process and it will almost definitely change over time as I make more and become a better artist. For 2D illustrations I haven’t really developed a process yet, I mostly just create a sketch of what I want, draw it over and over until it looks good, then do the line art and colours! I still don’t really know how to do shading, or how to do backgrounds but I’m happy where I am with my skills currently. As for 3D art my process is slightly less chaotic in that I block out the big shapes of an object and then add detail, colours and more. I’m still new to 3D modelling but I find the process really fun! Which is great since I want to make more 3D games in the future. By the time we were getting close to the deadline I realised that there was way I could realistically complete the demo, so I pivoted to creating what I called an “Art Showcase” basically take everything I’ve made and put it all together in an art gallery like experience using Unity.
When it comes to problem solving, the main problem I end up having is forgetting to write it down. When I create anything, I end up hyper focusing on things until I either lose focus due to outside influences or until I finish what I started. As such I end up not getting a lot of what would be easy marks as I forget to write down the problems I’ve solved and then shortly after I forget the problems themselves. I think the solution to this might be to set timers for breaks and then before the break write down one problem I solved whilst working.
For presentation we had to make an itch.io page for our project, I had mixed feelings when it came time to make mine. On the one hand I knew what I wanted the page to generally look like but on the other hand I struggled to have the page reach my standards. I wanted a beautiful page with custom art and good-looking screenshots but those would take quite a bit of time to get so I had to dial it back unfortunately. Though I still decided to make a logo, as the page felt incomplete without one.
Before I conclude I’m going to briefly talk about the weekly reflections I did over the course of the FMP. I created a template for the reflections to help spark inspiration for what to write about instead of just having a blank page and anxiety, this did help quite a bit but around the halfway point I did start writing much less than I wanted, mostly because of fatigue and forgetfulness. In the future I’d probably flesh out the template with more questions to answer to help jog my memory, as well as maybe a reward for doing it asap instead of several days later. Moving on to the final evaluation and my conclusion to how this project went. I think I did well given the circumstances that befell me and the time I had to work on the project, I didn’t get as far as I wanted to, but I finally made a complete thing. And according to my tutors it’s the best thing I’ve made whilst on the course, so that’s a good sign I’m on the right path. I’d love to continue working on the game after this week as I love the characters and setting, and I want to make a complete game which given what I currently have shouldn’t take more than a few extra weeks. My plan is to create a demo and continue from where I’ve left off in terms of creating assets and begin writing a short story for the demo. I also want to try creating some mini games to reflect the fact that the full game will contain a lot of them. I really want to make a fishing mini game. I think that’s everything I have to say… bye.