Today I will reflect upon my project and evaluate my successes and failures throughout the development of my game. To begin this process I will first compare my produced assets to those of a similar video-game and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of my products compared to those of the pre-established game.  

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First of all, the bottles/potions and heart canisters from the Zelda franchise (Nintendo, 2011). The Legend Of Zelda franchise has a similar target audience to our own game and is also of the fantasy theme. Within these games the player can collect potions to recharge their health, similar to our own game but instead the player receives a power-up to help them progress further within the level. Artistically, I think the two assets - my potion designs and Zelda's - are similar and  therefore I think I have achieved the intended  art style to appeal to our target audience- as effectively as a pre-established game like Zelda does. I think the use of low poly textures helped me in this task because it allows for a smoother, more well-rounded art style, something that appeals to our target audience of a younger audience as well as older audiences playing for the nostalgic effect. I also think that the limited shading/block colours were successful at appealing to our target audience because of it's simplicity, too much detail could hinder the immersion of a younger player due to being overwhelmed by all the stimuli. This is also evident in the heart containers from Zelda, with their block red heart and simplistic glassy shell. From this i feel that, despite not being clear, my potion's glass is effective because it is easy to identify that it is glass with it's transparent texture, much like Zelda's assets, but the coloured hue brings more of our fantasy theme within my assets.  

 

Upon looking at the potion from Zelda, I now think that the green bottle's final design is the best out of my built potions, this is because of the interesting shape, colour and cork. I believe that I should've used a full block-colour-brown for the texturing of the corks because I think that it conveys the appropriate tone of our game and adds to the simplistic nature of our assets. Overall, I think that our designs were compelling to our audience because they were simplistic and intuitive.

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Reflecting upon my research skills, I feel like I have researched into a broad range of medias and have developed my project from the knowledge gained from them.  I have read many books to enhance my research but i think that The A to Z of Fantasy Literature (Brian Stableford, 2005)​ has helped me develop my game through it's insightful knowledge of my fantasy theme. Despite only referencing it a couple of times, this book has given me inspiration for both my project and my writing style in general. This book explains several tropes, cliches and plots that the Fantasy genre relies on and then gives Stableford a platform to express his experience and views about them. On the other hand, I feel that, despite my broad variety of  research, I neglected primary research too much. In my opinion, primary research is key to building a well working game that is specifically tailored to the project at hand and therefore I feel like our game lacks the required audience feedback in order to have our own niche group, not just results from 10 members. This lack of research could result in a bias production of the game because their views could not represent the audience as a whole, consequently leading me to tailoring our game to a skewed perception of our target audience and therefore might not be as successful as wanted. 

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I also feel something that i did successfully was the thorough analysis of our theme and genre, with several research documents going into deep detail about the selected topic. This was effective because we had a clear perception of what they should be and how to apply them to our game, an example of this being the research into styles and types of fantasy and what makes a platform game?, respectively. The research from the styles and types of fantasy helped developed our game massively, with us being able to select a clear sub-genre within the fantasy theme that fitted our game - Fairytail fantasy. Similarly we were able to pick a clear sub-genre from platform with the help of what makes a platform game? - Endless Running. From this, we were able to create a level design that could accurately represent an endless runner by adding the path and the obstacles within the players way. We also applied this to the colouration and style of our assets to have a woodland colour scheme to reflect the Fairytail element of our theme. However, this research came at a cost, despite being able to research in depth, I didn't leave myself enough time for the write up of the research, leaving me to rush through them and not complete them to the best of my ability- with some research not being completed at all. This could be costly, as without them I could loose marks and therefore not get the grade wanted. A small solution to this dilemma was to put them on my site but instead of showing how i got the research, show what i have learnt from it - this method was much quicker and still showed that I did the research, just didn't have enough time to type it up. 

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Throughout this project I have develop several practical skills whilst using Maya and Unity, particularly my 3D modelling skills. With having little experience with 3D modelling before this project, I have developed my ability greatly; being able to both use primitive structures to build models as well as being able to edit/manipulate the mesh in order to get the results wanted. Overall, I think that I have learnt the necessary tools within Maya and Unity to build models and levels respectively but I could've developed my skill with Unity further by learning how to code within the program and therefore develop my knowledge to learn how to use C# to code and therefore could be worked upon within the future. Whilst modelling in Maya, i overcame many obstacles with the biggest including the texture transfer within Unity; when exporting my models into Unity the material of my potions would be replaced by the next potion to be exported, leaving my multi-coloured potions blue. After researching and experimenting within both software's,  the problem seemed to be caused by me naming the textures the same (Glass) and therefore they would be replaced within Unity, solving this problem by renaming the textures with their corresponding colour within Maya. 

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Learning from this project, within the future, I will work on my time management skills in order to effectively meet the deadline at hand. Along with this, I will use the knowledge gained from this course to get into University. Skills learnt such as; level design preparation/whiteboxing, 3D modelling and researching in how to make an appropriate product would give me an upper hand compared to other students that might be applying for the same courses as i am. I can also carry this knowledge into my career; for if I ever become an Indie developer these skill will be essential to the development of my future products. 

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