Presentation

This was the week of the presentation and we as a group are confident in our speaking ability as we have done thin quite a few time at this point. As a group I think that our presentation was the best as I think that we delivered an appropriately timed presentation compared to other groups and with all the details that someone would actually like to know. We all spoke with confident and there were no issues with the presentation and nobody messed up their lines.

I think that I delivered my part well as i was responsible for the Intro, UI segment and outro. For the intro I allowed everyone to introduce themselves and then I told everyone what we were going to run through with our presentation.

At this point we were also preparing the GDD, we all knew what parts we needed to do and we all completed them to the best of our ability. I wrote about the UI for the game although i wasn't able to write as much as I wanted as we were reaching an extremely high word count and we wanted to keep it from growing even higher.

More UI Implementation

For this week i working on improving the UI that i had been working on, the goal was to add some more impact to the health bar so I made it so that when the player goes below a certain amount the health bar will start flashing. This is standard in games as lots of games from different genres have this effect from Pokemon to Fortnite. This effect is simple to made but it makes a world of difference as it give a clear signal to the player that he has been damage.

I also added a stamina bar at this point as there were some issues we were having in the game that would of been fixed with stamina bar. The problem was that the player was able to roll whenever they want, this is a problem because they player can move too freely which makes it hard for the beast to hit them because there is no consequence for rolling too much. Now the player has to spend stamina to roll, and its a significant amount.

We had already implemented the stamina in the game but only now was the functionality was given to the roll. I was the one to link the stamina to a UI element which was quite easy but there was some tweaks that needed to be made.

A topic of discussion was the colouring of the health and the stamina bar, Aled brought up a topic of colour blindness and how the colours we were using would not be helpful for colour blind people to play. We don't think that anyone who tested the game had this problem but it is nice to think about as a future proofing effort. We came to the decision that the stamina bar would be thinner instead of changing the colours entirely.

Thoughts on this Semester

As this semester comes to a close there are lots of things that I would like to recap on and there are things that I would like to get off my mind. As a group I think that we work well together as a proper group, not just a group of yes men, when we think that there is a problem with something we will always bring it up and we will have a discussion about it, I think that this is what drove the evolution of our game and it is very different from the beginning. Initially the game idea was very bloated and ambitious which was a problem that only grew as the weeks went on. This ambition was in good faith as we really wanted to create the best game that we could but as the weeks rolled by we were constantly cutting things to make things more reasonable. Things that we cut include the world being "Open/Semi Open world" and the Combat Combo system. If we had all the time in the world we would be able to create a game with these features but the fact of the matter is that we had a whole other project to do and we had to stick to a deadline.

I believe that my contribution towards this group project is much better this year compared to previous years as I have always tried to be in every conversation about everything even if it wasn't specifically about programming. I have also tried new things this semester which i think has really improves my list of skill that will be very helpful going forward into the second semester. I am proud of my growth throughout my time at university and I hope that i will continue to grow because there are still things that I need to work on when it comes to weekly work updates.

For next semester we are also assigning someone to be a manager for the group as we think that this will be helpful in keeping both sides of the team moving together properly as this was a consistent issue throughout the semester.

Testing Session #2

This was the week of our final testing session for this semester, this was the final time for use as a group to show what we are capable of. At this point I had added all of the thing that i had aimed to add such as the Health Bar, Stamina Bar, Radial Menu and a pause menu which showed the player the controls for the game.


The biggest implementation for this session was the Radial Menu for the players skills. This was vital as up to now we basically has to tell the tester the controls but not anymore. The radial menu was accompanies by some nice icons. They also had timers on them when they were used which is a standard in video game as games like League of Legends and Risk of Rain use this system as it gives precise values on when the ability will be off cooldown.

When it comes to the actual testing day I was ill so i wasn't in to watch people play our game which was quite upsetting but i heard good things from my team mates. They said that people enjoyed our game more then before. The UI was better implemented so players did not have to be told what to do which was a success in my book. I am happy with how to game has turned out for this testing session as i played it the day after.

Now that the bulk of the game was completed and the final testing session was over the only thing on my mind is the upcoming presentation, at this point we have a presentation ready to go but we still have some rehearsing sessions to go before we are confident with our performance.

The week before Testing #2

It is the week before the second round of testing, this was quite an important week for all of us as we wanted to show everyone has the game had improved from last time as we think that it is more fun then our previous testing session with the implementation of the abilities.

My task for this week was implementing the graphics for the UI, I had been talking with Scott about various health bar and stamina bar design and we had talks about the direction we would like to go with it. We ultimately decided of going with a segmented design for both of the bars as we think that this would allow the player to gather a lot of information in a short amount of time thus giving the player more time to focus on whats in front of them.

Here are the designs that I received from Scott.

The top bar is the health bar as it start off thicker then thins out towards the end, the bottom bar is the stamina bar which keeps its thickness all the way. We thought this was the best design as the Health bar has a more intricate design then the stamina bar but they are still more simple, the slight intricacies of the health bar give it a More important look which is what we want as health is the most important resource in the game.

Ability Implementation

This week was the week when the programmers starting to start with abilities for the player character, we have already created a list of abilities that we would like to implement in the game and we decided to just look into a select few of them. I was tasked with the UI for the radial menu in the bottom left of the screen. This will hold the skills mapped to the face buttons of a game controller.

I had some initial ideas on how I would implement the functionality for the skill UI, I have some initial complications with the new Unity Input System that was really halting my progress so I decided to put this on halt for a while as I decided to work on other projects and have a small break.

Testing Results

On the 5th of November we had our testing session for our game, the goal for this session was to have people play our game and then have them fill out a form to gather the results so we can look at the data as a whole.What we wanted to gather from this day was honest opinions about our game, i wanted to find out if the player would of wanted to play it again and if they thought that the game was fun. Every time that i had played the game i didn't really have fun and i think that is the major issue that is plaguing the game.

Overall the testing session went well as we had lots of people test our game and fill out the form that we had made prior. These are the results of the testing.

 

 

 

This was the most important statistic for me as the UI programmer, this statistic revealed to me that the HUD was not convey the appropriate information. The problem was that people did not think that the health bar was the players. The players thought that it was the beasts which was a problem because they would hit the beast and the health bar wouldn't go down which would confuse the player. A fix for this would be implementing more UX so that the player has a better idea on whats going on.

 

This was a confusing one as we were going for a minimalistic take for UI as we think that a simple UI allows for a lot of information to be conveyed in a short amount of time so that the player can concentrate on the beast.

The next step for this game is thinking about the UI and the UX to improve the experience the player will have for the game. My next step is to implement more UI into the game such as a the main menu and the settings menu although the functionality of these menus will be limited for the time being.