Eval

The task we were given is to use our skills from last year to make a small game to refresh our memories in the mood for our main priority. We were able to be in groups of 2 to 3 so naturally I partnered up with good friend Isiah who i worked with the whole of last year and I work to a good degree with. I knew when going into this project that i wanted to push myself to do something challenging and I wasn't sure what exactly that was in particular.

Communicating with Isiah about the work was fairly simple due to us always being in contact with each other online and in college. The idea was to make a Zombie survival game with waves of NPC's and some sort of magic involved. How ever there were complications with the video i was watching as it wasn't fully completed nor did it look like it would be finished as the YouTuber stopped the project 2 years ago but still post other types of content no so we had to figure what to do with our game. I was on the side of coding the game texturing it and so on while Isiah was modelling and it became apparent to me that the work was going to be too much for me to do on my own so i asked Isiah to help out with the coding side also which didn't happen. I feel like we could of talked over and planned out this game a lot more then we did and had a rough idea of what we was doing. We had multiple conversations with Jez and Owain how ever i believe we could of gotten into more detail rather then just coming round and asking hows things are going, I notice other people were getting into conversations and able to talk to Jez about thee problems and I wish I was able to also have a bit more time with Jez to go over some problems we were having with our game.

We poorly kept to a time schedule as we were fully convinced about the idea we originally had so we didn't make a timetable in the end which I believe held us back just a bit as we didn't have a clear goal or time frame to strive towards so there was no motivation to get things done. It was merely a case of what do we think needs adding, create the model add it in and asses if it looks good or not. This "strategy" and not real structure to getting things done we added bears, some objects and a ramp to our game just because we could. If i can redo one major aspect to our game it would be setting time goals and a schedule just to push a bit of motivation from the two of us to get things done.

 My research went pretty well for our first idea as I got multiple pictures and made a mood board packed full of zombie related ideas that could help us with setting the scenery of the game and the feel. I also did a bit of research on weapon designs for the game too as I was thinking about adding guns into the game such as the Thompson and Trench gun which were classic guns back in CoD World at War but also thought about how I could redesign the guns too to make them look more unique like adding stone textures or futuristic texture to make it look like it not from this world. It didn't go too well due to plan changes and all the research i did was null. I will definitely sit down and figure a fixed idea before going a head with work and research allows me to gather more information and more useful research and pictures to increase production speed.

I encountered multiple complications going into this project as I had to do a lot of coding which I hadn't done previously besides simple animations. My first problem was when I went into making the zombie waves system as the video I was following to make a CoD Zombie remake when through different steps to make different aspect of the game but was never completed so it never showed me how to make the wave system or weapon system, it had the movement locked down and the player health but i did manage to be able to use the zombie AI chase mechanic at least which i applied to a basic looking bear model into my game. Now i got the "zombie" i had to figure out how to kill it, this was the biggest struggle out of everything as there was absolutely no video on YouTube and no forum online I could find that teaches you how to make a shooting mechanic in unreal that shoots one "bullet" let alone multiple to imitate a machine-gun. This was an annoyance but after looking I settled with a shooting mechanic that wasn't exactly the best but it shoots so I didn't care, i thought  i could modify it later but that was impossible due to the way it was designed. However it shot a bullet so i didn't complain it also went onto talk about making a health system, I tried to follow but it had multiple custom codes with no access to it them so i had to get Jez over to help me out using his way of making collisions with the bear and missile which was bugged as the missile had to be a solid object to do damage which meant when it collided it would hit the bear about 6 times.

In conclusion this project though it be 6 weeks taught me a lot about having a clear focus on a project instead of winging it. I have had a long conversation with Isiah about our next project and said we need to plan things out more and get a schedule going to make sure we finally complete a game I can be happy with. I will also be looking into planning out the game as id rather of had these 6 weeks to plan out my game on paper first before making it.