Evaluation:

I came up with my idea by just a language, Polish; a friend of mine speaks it and I quite liked the way it sounded, decided to try to learn it and here I am, this office is set in Poland 2005. The goal was to create a quiet atmosphere, as this office has just been raided. I feel like my final product meets my expectations and intentions to create a loose story driven game, this is because I have my letters and a shadowy atmosphere. However I feel that I lack some details from the range of things I meant to include: bullet casings, battering ram. I now know what I wanted to make and with a bit of time after writing this I might be able to add these.

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I found some images of games that used a similar theme, LA Noire and such, I got some images inside of houses in Poland. I feel I did enough research, and good research at that. My primary and secondary research didn't affect my product too much. There's not much in the way of influence of my research, apart from a site called AmbientCG, a free texture site, with 4k textures. I think this because the research I did hadn't applied to what I had in mind. I however think my research may have been a bit thin; I didn't use many other games for my research as I saw none that had the same theme and setting.

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I ensured my planning was well done by focusing days into just planning and making sure I knew what I was doing. I didn't use many planning tools, I touched on Trello a bit, I didn't find it too helpful though, so instead I just modelled what I had noted down. This works better for me; as I prefer to have my work on a hard drive rather than on the cloud. I found that my planning may've been a bit short-winded however, I did well in the beginning but then my plan fell off as I got into the swing of things, I found that my production was quite bumpy though as my OneDrive hadn't been syncing properly as I closed my computer prematurely, meaning my work didn't save fully, leaving me with a past level save as a result, these problems would've arisen anyway so I wouldn't blame the planning but I think I should keep it in mind for future projects anyway; for these projects I need to use some more structure in my production, otherwise it's all over the place, and I'll never be ready for my production.

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I encountered a few problems along the way, concerning Unreal and the computer in general: I don't have proficiency in Unreal and its blueprint system, so I had to search up how to do certain mechanics, such as the reading letters. The college's OneDrive system is also alien to me so I didn't know that I had to wait for OneDrive to sync my work to the servers, so for the first week I lost a bit of work, setting me back a whole week. I found the best way to tackle these problems was to just do a quick google search: if you've got a problem, other people probably had this problem too. There was an annoying problem with unreal where I couldn't use ray traced lighting and a static lamp, I decided to just use the ray tracing as it gives the game more atmosphere. I feel I have developed a good understanding of how to tackle error messages, as Unreal has a great syntax for the messages in question.

 

I feel I have developed a good proficiency in 3DS Max and Unreal, I've gotten better at tackling problems in both programs, this will make my future projects better and much more thorough. I used AmbientCG to increase the amount of modelling I could do, mind you I haven't done as much as I could, I feel I could do some small details to make the game look that much better. I find the best development I've made is texturing and lighting, as these really help to sell the game's atmosphere and immerses the player in the game.

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My final product's lighting is something I'm quite proud of, I think it gives the player a sense of being, as it looks a bit more realistic. I could've given the player more things to pick up, as the game is a detective game; I think a png of a gun with a gun in a bag model with some text hinting at what it was used for might've been a cool thing to add: all in all my project could've done with more substance. I think the change of geometry - due to technical difficulties - helped the game feel more full, the slight push back though gave me less time to work on the minutiae. My final project is suitable for my intended audience, although missing some rigidity so that may drive away people. My feedback though shows the time I put into the project paid off:

Lighting: "the lighting was brilliant"

Atmosphere: "The Atmosphere was very ominous and eerie"