Exegesis

In this Emotive Games project we needed to build a game that conveyed a feeing or emotion rather than just a story this was undertaken by the whole class and we divided our resources and got external help to make a fully functional game, Our goal was to convey the feeling of the spoils of war not the riches that come from it but the spoiling of the land and it’s people how war is hell and it’s not something that should be taken lightly, for this we based our main research into WW1 specifically with the miners as their job were one of the most brutally demanding physically and mentally, then through this research we constructed a game in which your teams miners would have to dig across enemy lines within 10days(not real time) and blow their camp to bits this would show the intensity of war and the cost of war if you failed your comrades this was our main goal once the final product was built.

The final product though has many problems with it and wasn’t made into the game idea we originally envisioned and it didn’t convey any emotions strong enough to any of our players, but this group project shows a good understanding of game flow as we have planned out our game windows in a logical order so that players aren’t lost in how the game works and how to play the game as a whole.

The finale product doesn’t have the tutorial needed to show the players how to play our very complicated game control scheme which we have kept instead of making it a simpler control scheme. The final product to convey emotion was to use the personal bios of soldiers and their different characteristics as they are supposed to hold value to the player and through losing individual characters emotions of loss should have been triggered since the game doesn’t have this component the lack of the emotional triggers towards each individual character is lost and they are just pawns to an end.

The product does succeeds in making the intense feel of the game through the timer clock and the opposition of an AI enemy system with an end state of defeat, the implementation of sound also adds to this effect of intense gameplay. The assets that where implemented was supposed to be a hard line type of style and most assets were designed like that but some of the assets have not followed the style in the GDD.

The animations implemented into the final product are crap they destroy the look and feel of the game by not being accurate in human movement all the soldiers can do the moon walk as the walk backwards and half of them glitch out while in game, and half the mechanics don’t respond and delay. This ultimate makes the realism of the game fade away and not even enjoyable as the bugs kill the gameplay.

The enemy animations are an exact copy of the player’s characters it’s hard to tell who is the enemy and who is the character and your players can die without you knowing. The overall run time of the game is now less then what it was designed for as there is no long digging sequences which makes it less strategical and more run and gun.

This product through the lack of proper balance mechanics and the ideal emotional set up of characters and their unique qualities with the proper sounds and background music our product could have been more successful if this issues were fixed and implemented right so that the project can actual engage the players emotions and make them care for the players.

The product is lacking in the sophisticated animations and mechanical controls to make this feel like a strategical game and make it feel more like an actual game instead of the current buggy hardly playable game that has little to no emotional meaning accept for the music if that even though the aesthetics of the game match the idea and time era of the game without the smooth flowing of proper mechanics and the lack of the tutorial and the voice acting to guide the player on how to play the game.

The products timeline and structure fall apart throughout the weeks and the proper iterations of the testing and juicing phase weren’t done well enough to ensure the product is found with less bugs as possible, The product has literally all the assets needed for it to make it a proper game but since of poor implementation the product lacks half the assets created and needed to properly convey the meaning of the game.

The ways we could of solved these problems for future projects and if we had more time, mainly would be the programming side to the game we really should have had 2 main programmers instead of one, even when one dropped off the project we could of elected one of our designers to work alongside the programmer so they understood how the code worked so they could easily and more effectively implement the assets needed once they were done this would of ensured that designers had constant eyes on the builds and how it was tracking further this would of made it easier to play test as the designer could play the game with each new iteration of the build and try to fix issues if they appeared instead of relying on the programmer which done his job amazingly this solution on its own would have made identifying bugs animation issues and gameplay and tutorial issues earlier instead of the final week.

Another solution is more or structured communications in which we all should of reported on either a mid-week bases what we were doing for the week on the group projects to exactly see how and what was being done while it was in the process of getting done this would of ensured that all the major necessary assets were done early on in the development process instead of what happened in this project were the less important assets were made within the first few weeks of development.

I think that this product has the potential to be a fully developed emotional engaging game if we took more priority in the implementation of assets and the testing and bug fixing was done this final product should have achieved greater odds than in it’s current state of submission which I am not 100% proud to show off to the public because of the many issues that are in the current product. This has been a learning experience in which I have identified how to handle good planning practices and now how to priorities assets that need more attention than others to ensure it the future projects to come that these problems won’t happen again on this scale to ensure next time we show off a more polished functional build.