Semester 2 Conclusion, Personal Update, MA Update, Plan for Semester 3

Semester 2 Clonclusion

Semester 2 overall has been a unique situation with both my previous employment purposely blocking me from doing my MA.  Having been restricted for a duration of time, it restricted my overall ideas specially with my breakdown of my main initial idea.  This meant that I had to reacess what i wanted to do for my MA.

After playing with a prototype idea, the idea of restrictions of indie development to AAA development really presented a unique restriction in what could / couldn't be done.  This made me think what other restrictions would a single dev have in developing a prototype to a good level within a restricted time.  With this, it gave me an idea for a new direction to take my development whilst utilising my reasearch in my semester 1 and expanding with other sections such as level design, games design and mechanic creation.

The overall development of two months work in both development, implementation and games creation is personally quite impressive especially with the development and idea of using AI development which I had always wanted to research into but never had a chance to do whilst being a teacher.  With restrictions came sacrifices in the overal game idea, searching via footprints sounded easy to make initially but actually trying to integrate the system into my already made AI system was much harder than intiailly thought. I have attempted to try it again but still came with issues and unable to detection of footprints *I will go more indepth underneath* so I will definately have another go later on.

With that, I developed some unique ideas outside of the initial idea.  Utilising it effectively to make the game more harder but also more enjoyable which is a major positive that can be seen within indie development as the thing I have seen and heard from devs in the indie scene that you are more versatile and creative at an indie level than in AAA as you are the main developer and not having to go through teams.

Overall, i learnt a lot in the idea of sacrifice to development which to an indie developer is an occurance that happens a lot. As from discussions with developers in relation to time constraints and system setups and working to skill restrictions, you as a dev unless you have lots of money spare to work with other people or to buy specific packs or equipment that have what you need, you are so restricted in the ways of development, (that is both in game development and mod development from discussions again with development).  From the previous two months, I have seen some restrictions in my own skills which I would love to develop on but it will be difficult especially if I am to ahdere and stick to a development time line. 

Going forward, this development understanding will help me ensure that I work to the best of my ability but I do have urges to go back and add more to the development but we'll see during the next 10 months of semester 3.

MA Update since last post

 

So since the last post, I have attempted to develop some of the parts again to try and see if I can get them to work.

In regards to the footprint system, it doesn't want to pick up the footprints using a different version of tagging the footprints with a tag that the enemy AI could pick up possibly via a macro like that is seen for player detection.  It wasn't working effectively and it wasn't working at detecting the footprints and allowing the AI to figure out what direction the player has gone.  With that, it was a fail to figure it out and make it work, with that it's the third attempt to make it work which is starting to get fustrating to figure it out.

Personal / Proffesional Update

I am starting my new job as a software engineer (games designer at its core *hopefully*) that is finally happening and my job is very supportive of me doing my MA which is a positive.  I look forward to working with like minded colleagues and also to work with game engines that I have never heard of to increase and diversify my abilities for the future of both my professional skills and personal game development as well.

So Semester 3?

 So the next step is to now start developing the game design itself.  Level design, asset creation, animation, menu design and sound design.  It'll be an interesting couple of months developing that and then getting to testing which will be intergrated into the time.  I think my idea of my learner agreement is the right idea and allows me to use both previous knowledge and upcomming knowledge for the future of my MA.

It's going to be a rough 10 months but I know it can come with some awesome results.