A.I Rising Evaluation
Introduction
A.I Rising was the final major project for this year. At the start of the project, we were told that we would have to design and create a 2d game based around the theme of Dystopia. We had six weeks to create a concept, game and design document based around this idea in our teams. This evaluation will talk about the methods used to create A.I Rising and how effective they where as well as how they could have been improved upon. This evaluation will also include peer feedback from playtesting and my opinion on how we could improve A.I Rising in the future based on this.
Requirements
When we were set this project, we were tasked with creating a 2d game with the overall theme of Dystopia. The project asks for us to work in teams using the skills we have acquired through the last year in UAL Games Development like coding skills, pixel art, sound design and level design to assign ourselves rolls based around what we are most comfortable with individually. In this project I was tasked with level design.
As a team we met these requirements by setting each other work coinciding with our different jobs, this was an enjoyable and new experience for us all.
Evaluation
Processes
Level design
My process of designing levels for A.I Rising started with me researching other games which I would use to draw inspiration from in my designs. I think that I could of done more research in the lead up to designing my levels but I did save lots of time by only doing a couple of games and I am happy with the research I did.
I also drew out my levels in my sketchbook. I like doing this because it allows me to change the levels as I go and it is also something that I do in all of my projects. I am proud of the drawings I did since they came out clear and easily understandable. My research also helped a lot with this since I had seen lots of good examples which inspired me in my research.
Coding
Overall my coding was competent I did not have many problems when coding but I could have focused on it more an polished the features that I did code more. I wasn’t the coder for our group I only coded a couple of puzzles in our game so I think I did a pretty good job. If I were to code on a future project I would spend more time before hand practicing my skills as without using them for a few months they have gone downhill so I will definitely take keep this in mind.
Feature designing
I really enjoyed designing the puzzle features in our game, it was the most involving and satisfying part of this project to me. The way I designed the puzzles was by brainstorming different ideas and then sketching them down before turning them into a digital version on Draw.io. I had no issues with this part of the development process and I really want to do this side of design more in the future.
Tools
In this project I have used a variety of tools to get to the final project varying from software for coding the game to software for drawing designs for features included in the game. The main softwares I used consistently are expanded on below.
Gamemaker Studio
Gamemaker studio 2 is an extremely useful tool for coding that I used in this project to create puzzles for our game. The puzzles I created using this software were a simple maze puzzle where you could not touch the sides of the room or you would be sent back to the start and an asteroid arcade shooter type puzzle were the player had to shoot an amount of randomly spawning asteroids. With the help of Gamemaker’s tutorials I was able to skim through different tutorials on the software to take out key segments that I could use in my own work. An example of this is the space rocks tutorial which I used to randomly spawn asteroids in my puzzle.
Gamemaker also caused some drawbacks for me this project which I think caused my puzzles to decrease in quality overall. When I was using the software one of my projects would keep crashing which consistently caused me to lose a considerable chunk of code on each occasion, I could not figure out why this was happening so I will just put it down to the software. Because of this I lost a lot of time over a few days.
Discord
Discord is a free text and voice chat app that can be used on PC and Mobile devices which also allows for small file sharing up to a limit of 8mb. I used discord with my group to communicate about the progress of the project as well as send screenshots of things like code and our trello progression. Discord was very helpful for us to allocate work while away from the college environment and continue working on weekends and the half-term period near the end of the project. We created a group server on discord which we used to communicate on mostly since we are all more comfortable with how discord works compared to other services we had access to like Microsoft teams.
Discord was not solely reliable though however since the limit for file that you can send with the free version is only 8mb which is not enough if you wanted to send the game or audio files to one another so to combat this we used email to send files.
Trello
Trello is a cooperative web-based project management service that can be used for free on any browser if you have an account. Trello allows you to set targets and document what you are doing, have done and are planning on doing. With trello we were able to create a to do list and have our project leader assign us tasks to do. Trello was a massively helpful tool in this project, and I would definitely want to use it again.
Draw.io
In this project I had to draw a few designs for puzzles which I needed to do online so that I could easily send them around to my team, Draw.io was the perfect solution to this. Draw.io is a browser-based software for creating diagrams. I have used Draw.io in the past to make flowcharts and layouts for story boards on previous projects so I knew that I could use this software effectively to create the designs for puzzles. On top of this Draw.io features a wide range of shapes, lines and visual elements that can be used to add detail into a diagram.
Working as a Team
Overall, I think we worked well as a team. We used Trello and discord to communicate and plan what work we would be doing daily. We were able to easily manage workloads to a good standard where everyone knew what to do. Although we worked well together for the most part, I did find that sometimes we would not all know what we were doing. I take some responsibility for this since at the beginning of the project working with a group was kind of awkward for me.
At the end of the project, we ended up missing out on a couple of features for our game. Mostly because we ran out of time due to issues with code. I was not a coder but to speed things up I should have spent more time offering help to the rest of my team.
My role was level designer and concept designer which was something I found to be fun. Im not sure if I would like to pursue this as a career currently but I would consider it.
Perspectives of Game Design
The four perspectives of game design are Genre, Audience, Representation and Semiotics. I think our game concept as a whole gave us an advantage when looking at the perspectives of game design as there is already a lot we could tick off or simply not have to worry about.
The genre we picked for our game was action-adventure with elements of a puzzle game. We picked this since the player spends most of their time exploring and fighting robotic enemies while also having to unlock areas of the level and gain progression by completing puzzles. I think because of these elements we did a good job at capturing this hybrid genre.
The target audience for our game was 12+. The criteria for a game to meet PEGI 12 standards means that there can be violence simulated in a fantasy environment against non-human characters so although our game had shooting it was against robotic characters in a fake dystopian world. Since we have not included any human characters in our game, I think we achieved this goal well.
I like to think that our game skipped over the issues of representation such as gender, ethnicity and disability completely. In our game the main character is a cat named Sunny, Sunny has no decided gender and is also a robot, so it leaves it up to the player to give them a personality. Our game also features no humans at all and only robots, so we did not have to worry about making sure they are diverse.
The final perspective is semiotics. We included semiotics in the shop and main menu, for example, the shop has a bright sign that says “buy” and then the price below an image on an item to ensure that the player can understand the way it works clearly.
Feedback
In the play test there was an issue causing the players sprite in the puzzle to drift upwards which would have annoyed the players. In the future I would definitely insure that everything is working as it should before giving out the game to be played.
I am happy about this result as it shows we accomplished our idea of creating a game which is well balanced.
I am glad that the puzzles caused difficulty for the players although I would consider these results inaccurate since there was an issue with the puzzles in playtesting which made them quite a bit harder.
Conclusion
To conclude, I think this project went quite well overall, but I personally had some hiccups along the way. In the future I would perhaps like to get a more involved role in the coding of the game as I think I could offer a much more needed helping hand than in the efficiency of our project. I enjoyed the experience of working with a team for a project and I can see how this is a great steppingstone into working with teams in the games development industry.
This project was also a great chance to exercise my knowledge and experience that I have gained from this course outside of coding a game like level and concept design so I am happy to have gotten this opportunity.
Seb Crowhurst Game Development 