Extended Practice Weekly Evaluation: Week 6

23rd of February to the 1st of March 2015
This was probably one of the most productive weeks I have had so far. The week flew by and the deadline for the research and development was getting even closer as it was a week away and this was the last week to get everything finished. I knew that I could do it as I work better under the pressure of having a mini deadline ahead and knew that I could get it done quickly, but it was definitely surprising to see how much that actually was in the end.

To begin with I completed all of my concept art for the Egyptian location, this included 15 all together, 13 rooms and 2 corridors to ensure that I knew where everything was going to be located. I was very happy with the final concept art and it is definitely some of my best work so far.

I then moved onto designing and developing the look to the collectibles as these are going to be scattered throughout mine and Sophie's level. We have 3 altogether that all do different things. We firstly have the eucalyptus leaves that are purely to be collected and there are 20 on each level to find. There is then the energy drinks which act like the mask in Crash Bandicoot and will give Keith more 'health' and eventually a short burst of invincibility. Finally there is the extra life token, there in one on each level and you have 3 altogether at the start of a level, loose them all and you have to start the level from the start and redo all your progress.

I then moved onto prototyping the level and I made a very rough mock up of the level to test the layout and how it plays and whether it is a good length. I found this to be really exciting and very helpful as I could plan how big jumps are going to be and whether or not anything needs to be changed before the final level is created. This gave me the opportunity to ensure the game works and is complete-able.

We then moved onto our design for the hub world that is going to feature in the game, and as previously stated Crash Bandicoot is definitely our biggest influence for this part of the project as it is a small hub but has a lot of interesting elements to it. We wanted to bring this into our game and knew we wanted to include more characters, so we both designed two more characters, or Ancients, as we have decided to call them, and come up with complete back stories for them as well, looking at who they are, how they came to be Ancients and just generally a little bit about their personalities. we then designed clothing for them and looked at designing there overall look. We wanted to link them with the worlds that we were going to be designing so decided to have each Ancient represent a different location in the world, so I created an Egyptian character and Sophie created an Indian one. But we then had two remaining so decided that the next two levels in the game where going to be based on England and China so that we had a theme to design our characters on and create unique designs and concept art.

We then designed the main look to the hub world, myself designing the location it is set in and the overall look, while Sophie designed the inside the assets that are going to be there to fill up the space further. We then needed a way of getting to the individual levels and decided to take inspiration from Spyro and go with a portal idea. We again designed them for the location, myself making Egyptian and Chinese inspired portals and Sophie making English and Indian style ones, in the end they looked really nice! We then looked at creating some simple designs for the overall look and planned where everything was going to go before drawing out some concept art, myself doing it for the outside and Sophie the assest featured within.

Lastly this week before the R&D presentation I created a mock up of the hub world so that I could test the link between the worlds. I created a script that would allow me to go through one portal and end up on the Egyptian level, go through that and enter a portal that would then bring them back to the hub world, and the same with the Indian level. We wanted to do this test now so that we could ensure that we could make this happen now rather than later.

Overall there was so many positive things being created this week and I was even able to begin character modelling before the deadline so that got a little bit of a head start. The overall research and development process has gone extremely well and together me and Sophie have successfully created an entire world that is now waiting to be created over the next couple of months. Its brilliant to see everything come together and make sense in the world and we are working extremely well together to produce some really high quality outcomes.