Game Design Document

Cartoon Farm Animals

I have teamed up with Esmee MacPherson, Nicole Goodman, Emma Byrne, Nhi Thai, Robyn Mulhall and Marcin Grabicki for this project. We plan on making an E-learing game aimed at four to eight year olds. Our original plan was to create a game with multiple different subjects to choose from. However after some research we realised that we have to be more realistic with the time that we have, and we have decided to make a maths based game.

We decide that we want the theme of our game to be based on a farm, as it will look colourful and appealing to kids as they will have learned about all different animals. Some of the games will include such things as counting shapes or matching up animals.

We have decided that we want to make this game as an app for an iPad because that is the most common device within children these days.

This week we all made the Game Design Document for our game, we each took a section and researched it and wrote about that in the document.

My section was sound and audio fx, so I looked into different sound effects that would help make the game more enjoyable for the child playing, we will have different animal noises corresponding with the animal. There will also be light and cheerful background music in the game.

Two games that we were inspired by for our game are Animal Crossing and Leap Frog.

GDD

First Playable

This week I had some more issues with Unity on my laptop, after reading loads online about other people having the same issues I tried loads of different suggestions to fixing it and I finally got it working, however my older work had been deleted and I had to start over, so this week was more or less a repeat of last week for me, with a bit extra.

So I just had to re-create my terrain again this week, but I added in the features of my bananas being collectables, I more or less followed the tutorial in which we made the gem spin, disappear when being collected and make a noise, but with a banana instead. This was all I had time for this week as I had to do the extra work for next week, but I will be catching up on this early this week.

Week 8 Progress

Make Things Happen, Pixaby

From looking back on this semester so far, I think I have made a huge amount of progress, at the start of the year I missed a good few blogs, including the 'Schedule planning' one, so thats a blog that I can't look back on and reflect how well I have stuck to a schedule. However as the weeks have gone on I have gotten into more of a flow to get the blogs completed and it is a process that I have gotten used to. I don't feel I have gotten into a weekly routine with regards to the blogs however and I do still struggle trying to find time to do certain blogs during the week while trying to balance assignments for other modules and also holing down a job. However I am determined to keep up my grade and complete all of the blogs in our final few weeks! I also haven't been taking full advantage of the extra credit tasks, and I am going to start doing a couple of them each week so I can get a better grade at the end of this semester.

Looking forward I just think that my main focus should be on time management and setting aside a certain time to complete these blogs as I feel that was my main pitfall this semester. I think next semester might be a bit easier for me, as I kind of know what to expect and have learned how this modules runs, as it is ran differently then any other module I have done before. I just want to get the work done from the start next semester. Another thing that I think would be useful is to attend the labs now and again, because this semester if I was struggling I didn't take advantage that help was there, and we should use this help to our advantage.

Overall, I feel I have come along way from the start of the semester and I am happy with my progress, I look forward to seeing the end result for my game! And I am also excited for a break from the blogs over the Christmas break..

Week 8 Comments and Feedback

Comments and Feedback; Pixaby

Today I reflected and read back on all of the comments I have received and also given. 

I have mainly received comments on my project posts, which is very helpful because this is where we could use some more ideas and reviews on our work. By getting comments and feedback based on our project, it helps us to get even more ideas for our project. It is through some of the feedback that I have received that I have been able to further my game ideas, I have definitely been given some good suggestions from people in my comments that I have brought into my game. It is a good idea that we have had to comment on peoples blogs because a fresh pair of eyes is always useful, and other people will have ideas that you couldn't have come up with yourself.

Commenting on other peoples blogs hasn't been my strong point as it is something that I haven't done enough of throughout this process, but I am going to commit myself to doing it from now on, because I find it useful from getting peoples feedback so others might find it useful from getting mine. What I have found about commenting though is that it is quite hard to give negative feedback as I wouldn't want to make anyone feel bad, and from reading the comments I have received and also other peoples comments, I think most people feel like this as a lot of the comments can be very generic and nice. I think most people would just feel bad giving people negative feedback.

I have definitely learned more about people from reading their introduction blogs, fun facts about people that I maybe wouldn't have learned from talking to these people on a daily basis. I don't feel like my introduction blog tells a lot about me as a person, I more so wrote about stuff that was currently going on in my life, I didn't actually realise that other people would have access to our blogs then I was slightly embarrassed when I found out everyone in our course had access to this, as it was a bit cringe.

Going forward I definitely want to commit myself to commenting and giving feedback on more peoples blog, as it is a process that is useful for both me and the person who receives the feedback. The only thing I would change about my blog is my introduction, to make it a bit more relevant for people who visit my blog can get to know me better.

Week 8 Reading and Writing

This week I took a look back and all my previous blogs and reflexed on them. Looking back at all the reading blogs I do feel my writing skills have improved as I haven't done a huge amount of writing within this course so far. One of my favourite reading so far was the one titled 'Games Decisions', within this post I mainly discussed 'cosy games' and how in these games there will not be much presence of danger and risk, by reading different articles about cosy games it really brought me back to my childhood as I used to play cosy games such as Animal Crossing, so it was cool to read the actual reasons behind why certain elements are they way they are in that game.

From looking back through my project blogs, its really interesting to see how much my game ideas and decisions have come along within the last few weeks. The original game idea that I went with was an world roaming/ role play game. My ideas for this game were for the player to create their own character, which will then be placed in a world that I was going to created, the character would be free to roam around this world freely discovering new places and new things to do. However my game has changed a lot from this concept as it is now an adventure and time limiting game, objective of this game is to feed the monkeys insatiable hunger, in order to keep his energy levels up and to keep the monkey alive. The player will be required to collect bananas which are scattered around the forest in which the monkey lives in. There will be a bar at the top of the screen which represents the monkeys energy level. Each time you collect a banana the monkey energy will rise, if you go a long time the energy level will decrease, and the monkey will die once the energy bar is empty. It is every useful that we have our GDD for our game and it is assessable through our blog, but it is also very nice to have the process in which our game has developed written out where we can go and look back on it.

Monkey Goes Bananas - Pixaby

This is probably one of my favourite pictures that I have used throughout this process, this is an image that I just happened to come across and it is what gave me the inspiration and idea for my game, I think it captures what my game is all about.

Overall I have found the project blogs a lot more useful and interesting then the readings. As someone who isn't really into games that much, I found some of the readings quite boring and a task to read as I just wasn't interested. However, I do feel that they were useful as I learned some useful information about games and game design that I would have never learned if I didn't have to read the articles. 

I am really enjoying the process of designing and discovering my game, I am excited for the final piece!