This project has been eight months in the making and it is one I am ultimately proud of. While the scope has inevitably changed since the concept began in the early stages of my dissertation, it is still something that captures my style and game design philosophy very well and is something that will remain a poster child as I begin to advertise my skills to the world. The second year group project that I directed To Be A Frog was previously the piece I would put at the front of my portfolio, but it’s nice to have something of a similar scale that is completely made by myself.

Due to the timescale of this project in comparison to everything else I have done, it was incredibly difficult to accurately plan what the final scope of the project would be from the start. My original ambitions were much greater than the final product, and possibly much greater than I could have possibly made within the time. The part of this all that interests me most is just straightforward game and world design which is why I had plans for more areas and a much larger story. But when creating an entire vertical slice of a game, it ends up being all the fundamentals like programming and modelling that take up the time, and extra levels and more storytelling has to take a back seat. While I do enjoy programming and modelling, I would love to just magically have that made and focus on just developing my world - which is why I would want to be a game director rather than anything else!

I ended up learning a lot - despite being recommended that this final project should be a chance to show what you’ve already learnt rather than learning new skills. However, I don’t think it would have been possible to do anything like this project without learning a lot. Some major skills I learnt include character animation, modelling/texturing in blender, unreal widgets, Jira project management, and a noticeable increase in my understanding of unreal blueprints despite that being a strong suit of mine for a while now. Learning blender was one part in particular that I noticed a steady improvement in across the course of this project. Modelling the Japanese fort was one part early on that took a lot of time (partly because I was being too particular) but it did help me fast-track my adaptation to a new software. By the end, I was modelling and texturing some of the smaller assets within a matter of minutes instead of days. I now feel I could have modelled that fort in a fraction of the time.

My time management potentially could have been better. My project has developed more in the last 4 weeks than the first 12. That is partly because there was a lot of learning and slow foundation work going on, but some of these early elements did take much longer than they needed to in retrospect. A glance at my Jira timeline would give the appearance of an immensely front-loaded project, but that is partly because I reduced my sprint lengths from 1 week to 2 days and mapped out much more minute tasks as opposed to the broader tasks I laid out earlier on. I’ve been working almost every waking hour for many weeks now, which has been a challenge. Unfortunately, it only pays to push myself when the scope of the project is essentially infinite. Jira did turn out to be an upgrade on my previous planning method even if there were teething issues. It became especially good during the 2 day sprint period where I was constantly moving tasks around.

The problem with my project simply being “make a game” is that there is no clear finishing point where I don’t benefit from spending more time on the game. The consequence of that is I do eventually need to get everything down in my journal, but sometimes it’s hard to shift focus when the games artefact is worth 70% of the grade. Even when I have every minute task mapped out and I’ve given myself time to do the journal, there’s always something that appears in the game project that takes priority. Even as of writing this there is some parts of my project that haven’t been properly recorded.

Even despite prioritising the artefact over the journal, there’s much more I would like to add to my game. Obviously I would like to add more areas to explore, especially on the European side of the world as the majority of the level focuses on the Japanese side, as well as some underground sections. But just looking at my left over jira tasks, I’ve got scatter assets like foliage and rocks, distant low fidelity mountain and foliage cards, and more objects to place around the world like training dummies/targets, barrels, and lamps (currently the interior lights are coming out of nothing). A larger task I would have liked to have done next is overhauling my soldier AI and detection system to a more custom function instead of the built in pawn sensing component. I would have liked a more intricate stealth system that utilised hiding in foliage. My animations were supposed to be placeholders as I just rushed through many of the basic ones in order to focus on implementing them into unreal and programming the mechanics.

Some of these omissions were a result of pivoting my focus in the latter stages of the project as opposed to any particular failure in time management. It was suggested in meetings that I didn’t need to focus on minor environment models and instead adding things like sound and UI would be more beneficial. Neither of those were things I originally had plans to add, but in the end I did end up readjusting my efforts into making those elements good quality. The addition of sound and UI definitely makes for a more complete appearing demo even if it wasn’t my design focus!

If we look all the way back to the very start of the project before deciding on a more specific scope, I had plans of incorporating some innovative design ideas from my dissertation, including custom note taking and map making systems, and a built in NES/Tunic style game manual. I even wanted to physically print the manual myself - that was a particularly lofty idea! In addition, my dissertation discussed the ability to make more aesthetic changes in the games settings to suit the player’s own rose-tinted nostalgia, including a switch between PS1 style and N64 graphics with its smaller textures and anti aliasing.

I wish I had the time to do more testing with other people potentially including a proper form for testers to fill out to gather data - akin to what I did for To Be a Frog. I did a couple minor tests but ultimately didn’t have the time to comb through every little bug and take suggestions like I would have wanted - there was always more glaring bugs and necessities that took precedent. I have managed to remove most of the experience-breaking bugs partly thanks to these tests, but an average player is still likely to come across a few minor bugs in the short playthrough.

In conclusion, there’s always more I could do with a project like this, but what I have is something I can be proud of. I pushed my limits and it showcases the best of my abilities to allow me to put my best foot forward in the industry. It’s also been a great learning opportunity and has helped me better understand what aspects I enjoy about game development and what path I want to take into the future. This game concept is something I would love to build on some day, even if I’ll probably be glad to see the end of it for now.