Once I finished my project, I wanted to make a small demo video it shows all the areas that are covered in my project. The only thing I did not get to put into my demo was the character implementation as my project demo was made on 4.16 and the character blueprints was made on 4.19 Below is a video of my game play though Below is a presentation that looks over the whole project that goes into depth about each section created for the project. Evaluation
Overall I’m proud of what I have created for the project, I felt like I kept to my game design document and that I didn’t go too far away from what I planned in this document. The only thing I feel that didn’t stay to the game design document was that character attacking and defending using melee weapons and in the game design document I mentioned ranged weapons. Nerveless I am extremely pleased with the project, I feel visually it has matched my concept art and feels like a sci-fi game. The project schedule felt help me create the project and keep the development tasks to a deadline, 80% of the time I kept to the deadlines that I set for the development task and only missed a few but these were justified and usually down to error and lack of research. I felt that the level design, 3D environments, lighting and interfaces went extremely well, these are the areas I enjoyed. I mainly enjoyed the blueprinting side of the area as well as world building once I had all the models built and enjoyed making the levels. I felt that the animations and character implementation didn’t go so well, the animations I didn’t enjoy that much and felt all the character animations were too rigged and didn’t look fluid enough, the only thing l liked about the animations was the animated assets I found these worked with my project and made it pop. I enjoyed the character implantation on the blueprint side but I feel what I didn’t match the game design project. I did learn a lot about blueprints in this part of the project. I think if I was going to choose a job based of this project that I would apply for in the industry it would be either level design, world building and game design. To conclude I am extremely pleased with what I have accomplished with this project, I have learned so much about making games and what it involves and all the areas and the works each area has. It has made me understand what I want to do in the game industry from this project.
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In this blog post I will look at other projects that I have done during this academic year and show how I plan to advertise myself with a portfolio and looking for companies and jobs in the surrounding areas. Game Jams Since the beginning of the year I wanted to try a game jam, I wanted to try that task of producing a small game within a short duration for a few reasons; working in a team; to see how far I could push myself; to be outside my comfort zone; to learn and work under pressure as well as having time constraints. These are a few reasons that I felt that could benefit me as a person as I feel these are topics that I would encounter once I get a job in the industry. The industry is a fast pace, constantly changing and always need to learn and adapt. The first game jam I entered was Unreal Engines Winter game Jam. I teamed up with a fellow student Lee Stockton as well as support for one of the tutors Pete Gibson-Black. The theme was “on thin ice”. Me and Lee brained stormed and decided to do some that neither of have done before and base if on a class arcade shooter style. We went for a top down shooter, we decided to create three small levels with a small story of a guy getting stuck in a snow storm to find that he was trapped with possessed snowman by an ice king. We had basic mechanics inside where the player could shoot at the enemies. We also had picks up for health, armour and ammo and had traps like ice that made the player loose movement controls. We broke down the tasks and we took control of areas of the project. Lee did all the mechanics for the top down getting it all set up, he also did the models and animations. I felt he did an amazing job of modelling the snowmen and animating them, even thou Lee doesn’t enjoy animation that much he did a great job on it. We had Pete create the background artwork for the UI, he did an amazing job for this and this help us out massively and fits really well with the game. I did the level designs, some of the smaller game mechanics like pickup, the post processing and the texturing as at the time Lee did not have substance painter while I had access to an indie licence for this. Conclusion This was a massive learning curve for myself having 3 days to produce the game was a mammoth task, we planned on a simple game but got carried away with the levels designs and started to produce to much work in a small time. We decided as a team to cut a lot out as we would of ran out of time and keep it simple to the idea that we original had. This was the idea of doing game jams we all about learning and knowing when to stop making something or asking the question is it needed? Also not having a form of source control had made transfer files harder sending the project back and too for both of us to work on it. Overall, I enjoyed the game jam, I learned a lot, I enjoyed working as a team with lee as we both came up with great ideas and felt the end was fun to play with. It had a few issues but that was expected within the time limit we had. We didn’t win anything for this game jam but that didn’t mean much to me as it was something I enjoyed doing and found it extremely fun. Below is a video of the game we made for the winter jam. For the second game jam we entered into Unreal Engine spring jam, this jam had a longer time frame than the winter jam which gave us a little bit more breathing space. The theme for this game jam was Transition. I teamed up with Lee again and another lad from out course Jamie Dubuisson. For this game jam I decided to take the role as project lead as I came up with an idea for the theme. For the transition theme we first came up with the idea to have 3 different eras that start of in the 1950 that transition over 1970 and 1990 then when we started to write the list of stuff we needed what we came up with would have taken a lot longer over the time period with three people. we then decided that if we stay to the 1950’s theme and have a transition between two characters that need to complete a number of puzzles to meet up and complete the level while telling a story like the player is taking controls of actors in a film. This gave us the idea of having a TV set as the screen and having the environment as a movie set. I set the tasks for the members, I looked at the time constraints, availability and the members strengths. For Jamie I asked him to take control of designing the robot that would be one of the playable characters and designing a couple of the models within the levels as well. The effort and time that Jamie put into his models where outstanding, I only sent him a few image references of what I was looking for and he went above and beyond trying to make the models. For Lee I asked him to take control of doing the large-scale models for the levels, create the non-playable charters and other smaller jobs in the project. The model’s lee created for me where high standard and did a marvellous job on everything he created the project. Giving lee access to the project via source control was also a huge beneficial as lee didn’t have to keep sending me the files and he could upload the models and set them up for the scene. My role in the project other than project lead was the game design and level design. I set up the basic mechanics for the game that the player would interact keeping it simple. The level design as well was simple, it was over two levels the first level was the menu which was just a camera that pans to different points in the level to give the impression of movie credits. The second level was the full demo level and all the blueprinting was mainly done in the level blueprints to make it quick using event dispatchers and trigger boxes. Conclusion I found this game jam more enjoyable that the first, it was a nice theme to work with and we had more time so it felt like there was more room to breathe and we didn’t swap our self serves with to much workload. The use of having source control also helped speed up the design process as we weren’t letting one person do all the work, so this saved time as they could import the work into project and set it up to be used. But the lack of spell checking I feel hampered the overall effect of the game but this is something we have learned for the next game jam. The work done by the team was outstanding and knowing that all three of us was working during the game jam as well made this jam feel like more of achievement and I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished for this game jam. As this was a recent game jam we still don’t know how well we did in the game jam but regardless of the results I am still proud of the team and the work we put in. Below is a video of the game for the spring jam. Self-advertising In this section I will look at how I could advertise myself to find a career in the game industry and look at where I can send my work to local games companies. In the games industry a CV can only get you so far without been asked to show previous work and a form of a portfolio. There are many websites like art station where you can upload your own images but due to the high demand on these websites a less popular artist might have the images drowned out. I first decided to create my own portfolio website that would show visual references of my best artwork for the areas I am currently interested in trying to find a position. I enjoy world building areas so something like Level and game design would suit me best. These are the areas I mainly targeted on my portfolio and getting a selection from the projects that I created and showing my work in slideshow galleries. I also showed model as I kept my option open for environment artist encase I was offered a job in that area, this showed unique models that I have created over the two years and as well as modular building. Below is a link to my portfolio https://alanhortonportfolio.weebly.com/ I then looked into social media, this can be used a powerful tool to advertise yourself and your work I looked into two popular platforms: Instagram and LinkedIn. Instagram will be used for a running live portfolio of my work posting pictures and videos of my work when it reaches a suitable standard and targeting certain areas using hashtags to advertise my posts in that area. LinkedIn would be used more a professional route, where this would be a live CV that would advertise my skills and send my profile to companies that have jobs advertised.
I set up my LinkedIn talking about my skill sets, employment history, projects and interests and set it up so that recruiters can look at my profile. https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-horton-5120a7141/ I also found a few websites that I can upload a portfolio and browse jobs https://jobs.gamesindustry.biz/ https://jobs.mcvuk.com/ https://datascope.co.uk/ https://aswift.com/video-games-jobs/ |
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