Evaluation

In this evaluation, I will be taking about how I think the process of me completing my Final Major Project. For my Final Major Project, I created a 2D football game where you play as different mythologies to score the most amount of goals in two minutes, it was created in Unity 5.4.1 and coded in C#. I chose to go down the path of programming as I felt I would enjoy that the most and would do the best in coding instead of art. I will be using my project proposal and looking back on my research on my blog to be able to compare the changes along the way.

Looking back at my proposal and comparing that to the final game I finished there has only been a little bit of change but these little changes where big, first was not including a challenge mode however I think that replacing it with another game mode was better as because it would off been hard trying to make challenges in the game as then they would start being very similar and start to board the player if they were trying to complete them all, instead of having a challenge mode I added a mode called season mode where you have to play one game against each other character and then after that you would see where you finished in the table with a number of points you got , this also had an upgrade menu where depending on a number of goals you scored it would give you an amount of points to upgrade your players movement speed and the jump height, you could also downgrade them if you felt they were a bit uncontroll able due to the touchy controls.

For my project management, I would say that the Burndown chart did help me seeing if I was on track to the project proposal table I made at the bottom of it because there was a blue line of the planned time how long it would take me to complete tasks then there was a red line which showed my current work progress, so if by the end of the week I saw that I was behind I knew that over the weekend I would have to do a bit of work to get back on track and not over run my project. However Trello I found it was not useful and was worse off that better because I would be spending too much time trying to fix it and get it write whereas I would prefer to create a list of ideas, then turning that ideas list into an ordered list of what I need to do it the right order then I can split that into smaller lists like artwork, programming, and management.

About my research into mythology and into Unity its self did help a lot, as it was my first time using Unity and working with mythology I had no clue about any different mythology creatures and how Unity worked but now I have learned so much in Unity to be able to make a game and in mythology it I learned the different creatures which influenced me when creating my artwork. The weakness though with my research was how organized it was, so when looking was looking my first code I can see how bad it is and my current code, there are lots of things I missed and should have considered when I started coding like making code reusable; I have lots of duplicated code where I only had to make a small change so I could of just make one script and change the way I do some features.

There was a lot fewer problems I came across that what I thought would be there in the game making process. The first hurdle I had to overcome was that I didn’t know how I could save my scores in tournament mode as when I went back to that seen it had all reset back to to the start, after a bit of research I found out that if there was a game object with a script which had DoNotDistroyOnLoad none of the variables would be lost, this feature has become heavily used in my project for carrying things over scenes like custom controls, the season mode scores with their points and upgrade points. The rest of the problems were all in the online game mode, this was because for your first game you should not be trying such complex things but I really wanted it in my game and was determined to get it in there with my own code, no tutorials just documentation and my basic understanding of networking. First, it was the other client was not able to move their character, this was a very simple fix which I overlooked somehow where I had to change if you are the host run movement to if you created is object run movement code, next was goal scoring did nothing on none hosts screen, this was fixed by rewriting my goal scoring script so it didn’t require so many objects in the script and it found them its self with GameObject.Find(“Objectsname”). Then last was what happens if one of the players leaves during a match and how to check that, it was overcome by making a check if the player count in that room was equal to 1 after the counter started then it would say “The other player left, Press Space to Continue”.

In conclusion, I would say that for a first game and setting hard goals to reach it went amazingly well. I now know the usefulness of doing project management, tools like Trello and Burndown Chart, things I should consider when planning and when starting coding. Over this evaluation, I have gone through my final project and comparing from my project proposal to the final product I made in Unity.