500 word evaluation

Working together with Liam, following up on our previous game design document has lead us into creating part of our game in depth and giving life to it. As Liam focused on the 3D side to this project, this gave me the opportunity to help him out with floor plans and concepts for rooms etc. I designed the exterior and interior of the flat in depth, using lighting and colour to create the mood we wanted in our game. The joint collaboration meant that we would get more work out of the time we had, and with our joint vision, we knew what to create. The main source of our joint work would be the floor plans, as I helped him by creating a floor plan for him to make in 3D. I set out where everything would be placed, and from this he could place 3D assets and make the room whole.

I am really pleased with how my 2D Art has come out. I worked harder this time around to find many pieces of reference material before I began my digital painting, and I found that this made it all a lot easier to complete. The gameplay side of my work had me looking at how we can make our game different, and also a challenge for the player. I looked back at how we had originally made the game play out and thought it sounded too easy for the player. The original concept was to have pieces of evidence that the player must find in the flat, three pieces would be picked up and the rest were unimportant. The player would be told which pieces were important and the character would automatically pick them up. After discussion with Liam we decided that this was no fun, and is far too easy for a detective game. That is when we decided to have a new gameplay mechanic, which would be the option for players to pick up any of the pieces of evidence in the flat. They would only be able to collect three items, so they must choose which ones they think are the most important. They would then be given a score at the end of the level. This also makes the gameplay experience more unique to the player, and if they miss an important piece of evidence they miss out on a cut scene linking to the narrative and case. This can mean that if a player misses lots of pieces of important evidence, the case takes them longer to solve altogether. It also means players are more likely to repeat the game after they have finished to try to get all the cut scenes and gain 100% completion.

After changing bits of the gameplay, I moved onto created a start menu and examples of our game. I enjoyed this thoroughly and am so pleased with the outcome. Using Premiere Pro I gathered sounds and music that fitted the mood of our game and with a mixture of effects and lighting, our game idea had finally come to life.