Video Game Evaluation

Chris Bailey

Comparison to Original Intentions• Do your planning documents reflect your final game

concept?• My final game concept is very similar to my planning

documents, I have kept the aims and game style identical to my plans. I have kept the available perks and upgrades the same, and the storyline matches up with the first designs. In my presentation I did not mention the ability to upgrade the games difficulty, party of my pre production notes, this is because I know as the game goes along it will get harder and harder, the ability to upscale the difficulty will make the game a lot less fun.

• Did you make any changes? Why?• I did not make many changes, although I did make the

graphic details better than I shown in my pre-production. In pre-production I kept the vehicles to a very low amount of pixels in order to have a very blocky effect, but during production I realised it wasn’t visually appealing and instead included more pixels which gave me the ability to use shadowing and other effects which gave the graphics more depth.

Original Vs Digital DevelopmentExamples

Fitness for Purpose• Did you complete your project according to

the brief? Look at Task 15 on the Video Game Brief on Blackboard and compare your work with what you were asked to produce.

• My project was completed according to the brief, although 1 of the sections of the task 15 brief slipped my mind and I forgot to do it. The loading screen, I forgot to create a loading screen digitally, I had the ideas in my head, but in the rush to polish up the rest of my project in the last couple days I forgot to create one. Although the rest of the list of “things to do” was completed up to a great standard, the image shows the list, although not identical to the task 15 list, it contains all the necessary information.

Technical Qualities• Is your work technically proficient? Do your graphics and animations

reflect professional conventions? Compare your graphics and animations to existing products.

• My game is definitely technically proficient. The graphics and animations reflect real game design features and visuals. The animations show exactly how the game would appear on an smartphone device for example. The graphics themselves suit the conventions for a pixel art game perfectly. The game is simple yet has shading to give the images more depth and detail.

• Discuss the strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement.• My game had many strengths and a few weaknesses here and there. One

of the great strengths of my games technical qualities was the animation design, the side scrolling style of my game allowed me to show the movement very easily in the animations. The downside of this was having to create a lot of different layers and tiny movements creating large GIF sizes. I made a few mistakes regarding the animations and screenshots such as forgetting to put the “M” for miles in the HUD distance section, so next time I would definitely put a little more attention into the smaller details.

Aesthetic Qualities• Does your work look good? What aspects of your

game’s visuals do you like? What would you improve? How would you improve it?

• I believe that my work looks good, and I certainly like the visuals. Although, there are a few improvements that I would like to add to them. One of these improvements is contrast between the vehicles and the space background. Due to the dark outline around the vehicles and the dark background, the vehicles don’t stand out as much as I would like. The reason I didn’t totally use opposite colours for contrast is because I was trying to use realistic shuttle colours and the space colour had to be dark obviously. I like how colourful the visuals are though, yes, the main objects don’t stand out as much as I would have liked, but I really like how colourful and visually enriching the images are, the bright yellow stars against the dark blue background and colourful obstacles such as meteors or the pickups such as the colour changing neon blue fuel orbs or pulsating hyper speed orbs.

Generating Ideas• How were you at developing ideas for your game? Did you

produce a lot of ideas or could you have developed them further?• I think I was good at developing ideas for my game, although I

could have developed them further, from mental ideas to digitally represented ones. For example I had the idea of the social network integration but I forgot to make any Photoshop images to show it, instead I just explained it with my presentation.

• Why was generating ideas important to your project? • I had to generate original ideas for my project in order to make it

different from other games and especially the game which inspired my own. Generating original ideas also made my game more personal to the target market, I would create them based on the audience research I conducted, although I also had to include ideas which would definitely appeal to them and original ones that they hopefully would like.

• What were the strengths, weaknesses and areas for development regarding you idea generation?

• My idea generation has many strengths. Firstly, I based them all on my audience research, this made sure that they would appeal to the audience that would be purchasing and playing my game.

Time Management• Did you manage your time well? Did you complete your project on time or would your assets have

improved with additional time?• I think that additional time would have been useful, it would have allowed me to take a step back

and think about what needs to be done, although if I wasn’t at work so much on the last weekend I would have been able to do more and may not have needed a little more time. Altogether I’d say my time management was good, I steadily did all my work plus the catch-up when I started the course, meaning that I was never in much of a rush to get things done. I wanted to have a script for my presentation but in the end I realised that a script would have not helped at all, in-fact it would have probably held me back because my explanation of the game would not have sounded as natural as telling it fresh.

• What would you have done if you had more time to produce your work?• If I had more time then I would have made a loading screen and a couple more environment

backgrounds, I was planning to do these all along but towards the end I had to choose either to polish up all my work or leave it rough and add in a couple more pieces of development. My priority was to make sure all my work was done to a good standard so I chose to fix it all up.