Keith Rogers

And lemme say. I am relived and glad to have everything done, to finally be at the end of the train of a pretty amazing year ride of learning game design. I learned alot in this course, all the skills i need to handle the role of game designer and i would like to thank the teachers that made this possible too.  

There were good times, bad times, some REALLY stressful times and some chill times. But in the end i really enjoyed my time here and i can’t wait to see what awaits us in our second year. I may also share a side project i’m in the middle of on here during the holidays in the meantime. 

Now if you’ll excuse me i’m gonna sleep and play the upcoming days away on Xenoblade 2 (Doing a whole year of work will do that to ya)

It’s finally done. We’ve not only finished our game but it is ready to hand in and readily submit. After a solid 2 months of planning and hard work it has all finally payed off. It’s such a good feeling to get this done and off our plates.

We also submitted more unit 7 items to get off our plates. There’s only about 3 more submissions items left for the unit (All due on the last week). But after that we’ll be home free for the entire year.

Alongside even more polish we also added in the proper start menu and implemented signs that will communicate the controls to the player, so that they will not be confused on how to play the game. The mother ship was also added above the city and hopefully the drones can still make it in. 

I also worked on a trailer for the game as per assessment requirement. I’m practically done with the trailer and have it ready for tomorrow. If need be i can make necessary changes before the submission. 

Our designer who was away yesterday managed to come in today and continue re-balancing the track, making even more progress. Our producer also worked on the environment aswell and with their effort they combined both together into one seamless scene.

For most of the day i worked on bug and feedback testing forms, getting them ready for the 2nd round of testing. Due to issues we have still getting our menu working i wasn’t able to get any testers on our game today. But hopefully tomorrow, that will be the case. 

Most work today has just been prettying up and balancing the project so it can be the best it can be. One designer is building the scene and making it look pretty. He is making pretty good progress on placements. 

I handled game play re balancing on the track. Another designer was meant to be tasked with this, but due to being away, i had to fill in form him (Atleast partially). He will be better and operating by tomorrow though, so i’ll be able to inform him of my changes that i’ve made and bring him up to speed.

Welp as usual it’s been work on the game itself. So i figure i’d share with you another screenshot of the game. Hopefully you enjoy it.

Though we’ve unfortunately had a bit of a setback with track building. Due to the method we are using to construct it, we were told it would take way to long to construct, which would go well beyond our deadline for beta. So we have to consult with our programmers on a quicker and more efficient solution. 

It was a slow day however as we had to sort quite a few issues with our road in Rad city, which slowed progress to a crawl. I had to rearrange some already placed down roads and obstacles while the other designer had to continue slaving away on more of the track.

And with some of our team being away today it made work in the other areas slow to a bit of a crawl too (In art and programming). But at-least we got even more testing done for our beta with even more changes.

We would start the day by performing a budgeting assessment in our groups by calculating the costs that are involved with running a small game studio. From equipment to the building, right up to the electricity bill.

Then in the latter half of the day we got back to work on our game as usual. While one designer continued working on the track and the game play, i would continue expend the scene even further and will add more as time goes on.

At this point we are trying to get the mechanics implemented and functioning before Wednesday (That is the due date for alpha stage) We’ve made a fair bit of progress but we still have a bit more to implement before we can call this alpha worthy.

Above is a gif with a Game play example. Enjoy at the wonders of my dodging XD (The first time I've ever posted a gif on here too)

As usual we went upstairs and would present like last time with our improved slideshow. Only this time we would present in front of a few industry veterans instead of the teachers. 

Overall feedback was that our mechanics were a bit too simple and that we could add a bit more in mechanically and even scenery wise. While they did enjoy our artstyle, they noticed a few inconsistencies with texture style for our objects and other glaring issues. 

Overall we learned that there is indeed room for improvement  and we will be working hard to make said improvements (We also will obtain more detailed feedback soon) 

We also worked on more submission items to hand in for today’s class and i manged to do a bit of scene balancing by testing the speed of the vehicle in the Unity project. 

After much feedback and iterations it is finally done. We went with concept art of the game play in full swing for the front cover art and a phrase to accompany it.

As for the back we went for a black background with concept pictures showing the main points of the game play with small phrases explaining what is happening in each. Short but effective.  

For the first half of the day we would work on our presentations and recite what we had to say. When it came time for our team, we had to present our presentation on our game Rad City and at the end we would receive our feedback. Overall there were areas we had to be more clear on and we needed more visually appealing slides and more detail centered on the mechanics as we skimped a bit in that department. We have dotted down this vital feedback and will use it for next presentation.

For the time we didn’t present we would continue progress on the game, getting it ready for Alpha stage of development.

Here they are