Beau Barker

I learnt that I am not very good at 3D modeling or art in general, and I was not happy with the results I gave during the art module this year. But through practice I have slowly gotten a better understanding of Maya and I have created a few small models for some personal projects.

I loved the whole concept of Narrative design and enjoy the Narrative Module this year the most. Understanding how a player will play the game you make and learning how to lead them is something I strive to understand more and have been practicing this a lot through personal projects at home and testing it on family and friends. 

I enjoyed my first year at AIE studying game design immensely. I am most thankful to both Shane and Ben who gave me a lot of important advise throughout the year and I look forward to what is to come next.

During this project I helped manage the entire team along with my Producer, we learnt the hard way that time needs to be managed properly. Our team wanted two weeks trying to create real physics for our combat. these two weeks could have been used to fix other problems that were already in our game.

Star Citizen is an extremely ambitious space trading, exploration and combat game. The game is an open persistent universe where players can do almost anything they want to.

I bought a multiplayer ship to play with family. It is a large cargo ship which would allow me to become a trader in space if I wanted to or I could buy the equipment to change my ship into a exploration vehicle for me to find new planets or worm holes that will port me to new galaxies.

I also have the ability to buy armaments for my ship and become a pirate who could attack NPCs or other players. Also a nice feature added to the game is the ability to board other players ships and take them over. Something I have tried only once.

In this game the player runs around collecting resources to build a factory, the end goal of the game is to build an launch a satellite into orbit, while simultaneously defending your factory from waves of a alien life form that live on the planet.

The game begins with the player or players having nothing in there inventory. Only 4 resources are in the game, Coal, Iron, Copper, and Stone. All of these resources combine to make other needed resources through manufacturing plants.

Once a factory is set up a player will need to expand using a rail and train network. with a bunch of sub factories set up collecting base resources to bring them back to the major factory to continue building the additional resources needed for the satellite.

The need to set up defenses such as walls and turrets to keep to aliens at bay who are attracted to the pollution produced by the size of the factory. the bigger the factory the player makes the more alien waves will attack.

With the map fully completed and each individual province on the map can be selected on it’s own. It is now time to write up a few scripts that will allow me to move the army and fleet units around the board from province to province.

I will if I can need to find a way to make the land rise up with terrain but still be an individual province if possible, I would also try to do this with the sea zones giving the map a more lively feel instead of just a flat board.

This game will be involve seven players each controlling a major country on the European continent.

The format we went with was to try to immediately get the person looking at this sell sheet to understand our game is meant to be a silly wacky kind of game. 

So of the feedback we got was that the combat mechanics were to plain and needed to be fixed or have more added to it. The game should feel like an over the top silly game but at the current build no member of the panel felt that about the game. And the size of the player compared to the environment around them didn’t seem right.

The team has taken all this feedback into account and is using it to make a better finished game. We look forward to continuing on our game and making an awesome silly noodle combat game.

So what did we take away from the feedback the teachers gave us after our presentation.  The first thing we were told was that we did not actually fully describe what our game was or any victory conditions to our game.  Other feedback included chances we needed to make to our slides and what words we should and should not use to talk about our game. All of these changes we have since made to the slides of the presentation and as a team we will be communicating more and practicing our presentation many times over before the final presentation. 

I have fixed a few of the bugs that made the game incredibly hard to play through originally but there are a lot more to work through and a lot of code that needs to be rewritten. I am hoping to have this game finished and playable before the end of the year, I look forward to the challenge.