Evaluation

Project Pitch

Click this to watch the pitch!

Pitches are very important within game development for multiple reasons. When trying to get support/funding for your game you will want to present the idea for your game in an organised and promising way. Creating and doing a pitch helps you to really sell your idea in the best way possible by allowing the people listening to the pitch to really understand what idea you are creating and how you will do it.

When creating this pitch presentation I tried to make sure that I included as much important information that'd sell the idea as much as possible, such as emphasizing how I will capture the audience of games similar to Soulmon through familiarity and a whole new direction within it's genre. I didn't go too much in detail for narrative as the main focus is the environment and characters within the tutorial portion I am creating, making sure that I'm not misleading people who are listening to the pitch into expecting a lot of narrative elements.

Emphasizing the focus on environment and characters, I really made the presentation appealing in a way that immerses people into the tropical environment I want to create in this project though reference images and decorations on the slides as well as having a slide dedicated to explaining how I am designing the characters to be appealing to the audience I am looking for.

When doing the pitch I'm happy with the feedback I got, I personally had concerns that maybe the lack of focus on narrative and more focus on exploring the appealing environment may not feel too much like a walking simulator experience but it seemed I was overthinking that part as a little bit of narrative should be enough. It seems I managed to explain most of the necessary information clearly through the presentation and some through questions, such as a peer asking about the perspective of this game for which I explained that the game would be a third person, top down game. Some important feedback to reflect on would be that I lacked any resources to backup my information on the age of Pokemon's audience and referencing research into the tropical setting.

The next step for this project now is to use this feedback to improve my idea through getting resources to backup information regarding the suitable age range for this game and the tropical setting, researching into tutorials regarding monster collection games and having a better understanding of the timescale of production within this project.

Mid-Point Reflection

I started the project with the idea of a monster collection game that features much more of collection and walking simulator based gameplay rather than traditional games within the genre. So far I've done loads of research on stuff I need to know for this project and have learnt a lot about the tropical culture and environment I'm basing the game on, what makes an effective tutorial and what makes an effective walking simulator.

With all of this knowledge I have already made a few of the character designs in my game as the characters are the most important part of monster collection games. For example, if you were to remove the Pokemon from their world, the world is practically the same as ours. Within my designs I have been using the research I have done about tropical cultures and environments to create concepts and designs that will fit nicely with the environment.

I've done a project pitch that had successful feedback that helped me a lot in what I needed to finish up with in terms of research. I also have done a couple questionnaires specifically for feedback on my character designs. I asked for feedback on the designs as well as how I should redesign one of the lacking ones and it resulted in a much better design in the end that people seemed to like.

In terms of organisation I have made a chart, asset list and a Trello to help me understand what I need to do over the rest of this project. I've planned almost everything of what is included in this tutorial section, from the character selection screen to the dialogue that Grandmother Brooke will need to say.

I still need to finish some concept art for this project and so I'll have that completely finished by the end of the holiday, as well as a finished blockout of my level with at least a couple working mechanics, with a priority on figuring out how to make working dialogue within my game.

Final Evaluation

Context:

The idea for Soulmon was a concept I wanted to use before we were told that what we were supposed to make was going to be a walking simulator. Because of this I did debate thinking of a new idea but in the end found that the focus on exploration and collection would actually fit well into a walking simulator experience. Walking simulators tend to focus on narratives and/or puzzle solving and the idea of exploring islands through the use of using different characters for different puzzles or transport seems like a fun way for a player to progress a narrative.

Considering this idea would be mostly open world, I had to be careful deciding what portion of the game I wanted to make and so I decided that I'd create the first section of the tutorial, this level would feature some open world elements while still being small enough to not be overwhelming to finish.

Research:

For a lot of my research I looked into tropical environments and cultures because I had decided the area in which I was making would be themed around that. I really enjoyed this research because it allowed me to come up with a lot of creative ideas surrounding the narrative and characters. Unfortunately I wouldn't get to use many of these ideas due to the fact that I needed the project to be manageable. Ideas such as god/goddess-like monsters being the cause of strong weather and hula dancing being used to tell a story as the game's exposition, both ideas being inspired by Hawaiian culture.

On the more gameplay side of research, I needed to learn how to create an effective tutorial. Researching this taught me a lot about how players are explained how to play the game in an effective way, commonly through a mentor character who both plays the role of making the feel safer in the environment as well as having information taught to you in a way that fits with the game's narrative, rather than an unnatural prompt that may break emersion. However, I did also recognize some other techniques used in tutorial development such as drip-feeding and other ways of presenting information in a way that fits narratively, such as Hollow Knight using ancient tablets which have the purpose of teaching powerful creatures on how to use their abilities, though this method can be less subtle compared to mentor characters. This tutorial research went well because I had a clear idea of what kind of tutorial I wanted, encouraging exploration and not holding the player's hand much. This meant that I could focus my research into tutorials and techniques that lean into that form of tutorials.

Pre-Production:

Soulmon is meant to be a unique spin on the monster collection genre. This means that the characters are the most important part of it. I started with making the starting playable character, which had to be a creature that'd live in tropical jungles. Pretty quickly I decided on a coconut/palm tree themed monkey that I'd name Cocozee. This would teach me a lot about how to use existing character designs as inspiration for my own ones.

The next design I made was the matured version of Cocozee, Palmzee. This design was important to make because it would be the species of the mentor character, being your Cocozee character's grandma. Designing this taught me a lot about how to make sure a design isn't too simple through feedback, I had suggestions given to me by a friend in which I used those suggestions to ask people which ones they would like to see the most. In the end I ended up with a design that I and others were much more happier with than originally.

For the grandma Brooke character I made sure to keep the same body of a Palmzee but with some clear signs of aging, both through physical appearance and pose. Her appearance is based around dying palm trees, being more wilted and yellower in colour, as well as her pose being in a sitting position rather than standing tall like younger Palmzee. I learned a lot about how to show off a character's personality/physical state through the character's design and posing.

The final character design that I made was the unlockable character within the tutorial. For this I learnt a lot about how to base a design around their purpose in a game's narrative. Knowing that I needed this character to be sleeping and woken up by the player's one and only ability to make a monkey sound, I was able to base my references and inspirations from that. In the end I settled on a sloth character named Pajamare, with a clear dream theme as well as an ability that can help the player progress in the narrative.

The character designing went well because I enjoy creating designs that allow me to be creative with ideas and I used existing character designs as references as inspiration for all of the designs. I do think that for this project a focus on character designs may have not been the best fit considering only one of the designs were simple enough for me to model in the end which meant that the NPCs in my game were left as default Unreal characters.

One thing that I had to plan before starting production on the game was some sort of asset list. This went well because I found using references of stylized tropical environments helpful in knowing what kind of assets I want to create for the level. Other things which I planned were a character selection screen, layout, the tutorial's narrative, the events throughout the tutorial and dialogue that the player would see through interacting with the level's NPCs. Having to plan all of this made me realize that some of this would have to be mentally categorized into higher and lower priority features, parts such as the dialogue and narrative would be higher priority than the features like the character selection screen and UI.

Production:

For the creation of the level itself, I started with creating the blockout of the layout I had created earlier. This was made easier thanks to Dungeon Scrawl which allows me to create layouts fairly quickly while still being easy to translate into a blockout level. The model creation overall went better than I expected, it went well because I had a small amount of models to create, only needing foliage assets that can be spread across the level. As previously mentioned, the only character model I actually made was Cocozee's, this was because the character models are obviously a lot harder to create than any other assets I had listed, let alone UV map and texture. This was mostly unavoidable but I could have had a stronger focus on the environment to work around my lack of abilities.

I did try and texture one asset being Brooke's house but never got to finish it unfortunately. If there's one part that I should have invested more time in it'd definitely be texturing but due to the project's environment being stylized in a simple way, I didn't feel the need to focus on it too much. This does go against my goal of trying to understand texturing better through this project and so in the future I will try and consider what goals are more suitable for certain projects.

I mostly made the functionality and mechanics for the level through YouTube tutorials, specifically the NPC dialogue but some mechanics I was able to figure out with not much help from the internet, thanks to older units I was able to create narrative text appear on screen when the player enters deforested areas of the level as well as allow the player to make a sound as their one and only ability. From this I've realized that I'm slowly learning how blueprints in Unreal work and hopefully can try more complicated mechanics in the future if necessary.

I did a few things in Unreal to try and enhance the environment. I used lighting to help make sure that the level was clearly set early in the morning, during sunrise. I also added wind material to almost all forms of foliage to help the environment feel more animated and alive. This mostly went well because there was no need for animation on any of the foliage, only add a material and adjust some sliders. One way I could have made the environment feel more alive would be by animating the one character model I did manage to make. I did want to give Cocozee a simple running animation but lost the time to try it.

Practical Skills:

One of the main practical skills I improved a lot on was character designs, learning what makes designs effective in their respective games and how to give them personalities through the designs and concept art. I don't think I improved so much on designing environments, considering this environment was mostly just a simple, tropical forest but I still enjoyed researching about tropical environments and doing a little bit of world building for the island that the tutorial is set in.

Mechanics aren't my favourite part of projects for the most part but I do find myself understanding them better, being able to create some small mechanics without having to watch and follow a full tutorial has helped me feel more confident with blueprints in Unreal and hopefully more in the future.

Through mostly experimentation of what I can do in Maya, I am slowly learning how to create better looking assets as well as making sure that they fit with the project's art style. I can see a lot of techniques I've used for certain assets within this project as useful in the future when making similar types of assets within stylized projects.

Final Product:

In the end I am quite satisfied with what I managed to get done, I managed to get lower priority parts of the project such as the selection screen and UI made as well due to the extra time I found myself having. There are a lot of things I wish could have been improved as peers have noticed and mentioned in my feedback form such as trees obstructing view, lack of a shorter grass to cover the flat ground in the scene and not any direction on where to go. Getting more feedback throughout the project could have helped with this since I did it for the concept art but forgot to consider it for the level itself.

Feedback on the final product however was extremely positive, people seemed to like how the characters and environment looked which is good as the visuals were the focus for this project. People gave some very helpful feedback through my question which was directly looking for criticism which will help me understand what features of an environment to think about adding in the future.

One of the key things multiple people mentioned was the lack of direction on where to go, this was a design choice to help encourage exploration by having no directions in a fairly small space but with a lack of testing I never would have known if it is actually effective. In the future I should try and get other people to try out my level more often because they may be able to give important feedback that only a new player would be able to give. People also wanted to see more variation in the environment, due to the focus on an environment that's mostly overtaken by nature I didn't consider adding many unique parts to find. There is a missed opportunity to add interesting things that only some players will find that may tie into other parts of the game's narrative. I could have even included some of the god/goddess monster narrative ideas that I originally wanted to add through secret areas of the level. This would have greatly enhanced the level's exploration value if included.

1/6