What was the most difficult challenge, and how did you solve it?
From working on this project throughout this course, I’ve found some significant challenges when implementing Ghost designs. For instance, when transitioning the Ghost’s colors for the body and eyes/mouth, it never transitioned properly from Blender to Unity. Because I was using unique Blender combinations, it wouldn’t transition to Unity and if I did, it wasn’t the same. After some weeks of investigating, I’ve found that completely rebuilding the colors in Unity would be best, but not knowing how shaders worked within this app was a challenge as well. It wasn’t until I watched numerous tutorials that I was able to get some great combinations for all the Ghost’s colors and is now the final design. This was the most difficult as I spend numerous hours attempting to figure out the problem, only to restart from scratch. Ultimately, I learned that Unity and Blender do work together, but I should always check first and see if colors and shaders integrate prior to putting hours of work onto it.
Do you feel your project was managed well or poorly, and how would you change things?
This project has been managed well in my perspective, but would like to change certain aspects of it. For one, I believe that having too many ideas on how to ‘improve’ or ‘immerse’ our game can ultimately backfire. I felt that as a group, we kept having ideas on how to improve the game rather than implementing the game plan that was set from the previous semester. I do need to voice out concerns in terms of what’s feasible in our short time frame and what could be added in our own spare time.
Did you initially have doubts about your ability to complete the project? How do you feel now?
I initially had my doubts about completing the project due to our group’s inexperience in creating games such as this. Even now, I still have my doubts because of how our ideas can seem like they wouldn’t be implemented promptly for just one more class. But, I never thought that from the previous class that we would have a significant amount of progress made in terms of level design, scripts, etc. But, I do feel like we as a group need to be better in laying out our plans to actually have a working complete game rather than trying to improve an incomplete game. Overall, I still have my doubts in completing a ‘completely finished’ game, but only time and preparation with my team will tell.
If you could start over, what would you do differently?
I believe that if our group can start over, I would set better task/responsibilities in terms of implementing our game. For instance, they’re aspects that we didn’t talk about that might be hurdles in the future such as who’s creating a player UI, the actual game scripts, etc. However, I think that our biggest disadvantage in implementing this project is our actual implementation of the template we laid out in the previous class. We have so many ideas/implementations that are amazing for both games but with our lack of experience and implementation, I feel that it’s inefficient when trying to complete the games itself. That’s why I would rather focus on completing the game itself, then add the features later would have saved us significant time.
However, as a team, we work significantly well together. We all have great relationships and trust each other to do our tasks/responsibilities. I do believe that we are steadily continuing to make great progress, so only time and attention in our free time will tell whether this game will be complete or not.
Conclusion:
This project, specifically this class, has taught me numerous things, such as time management, perseverance, and the gaming development perspective that I never thought I would experience. Even after working on this project for a total of two semesters, I instantly love working on gaming and character designs, and I am looking for any type of internship that involves this. Time management and preparation are, in my opinion, what I learned most in this class because, without a great layout week to week, one could get lost in trying to implement the tasks at hand, which could be stressful. That’s why setting time apart and following the gameplan (sprint goals) is what I learned and strengthened throughout this course.