The Prototype
In the beginning, this project started out as a first-person shooter with thriving story that supported the usage of robots and androids. When you first enter the game map, you start out by seeing yourself as a robotic looking model and as the camera turning about you see A.I. drones walking around surveying the area looking for problems that may occur in the lab. So polishing this artifact, I wanted it to appear as though you are not in a safe space, but lack an general understand of how to escape.
Originally creating this artifact opened my eyes to how simple it might be to create and develop a game overtime. Yes a great deal of work goes into game development, but it is not one of those unreachable goals even for a solo developer. Learning how UI/UX design works within a game development engine and even how different classes pass off information to another provides insight on how games are suppose to function instead of just relying on two or three different class which is what I am more accustomed too.
Making and refining this artifact, gave me a bit of difficulty originally. I am not as fluent in C++ as I am other programming languages and even using C++ to interface with UE4 prove to be quite challenging. Though to resolve a lot of the issues I was encountering simply required a little research. Learning how others facing similar issues resolved them, provided a deeper insight in how to fix some of these issues. That being said, repetition is the real teacher for this profession. In my experience, addressing similar issues repeatedly builds and active knowledge of how to resolve others.
The feedback I received for this artifact was limited to a small group of people witnessing my work on it. Though, some close family members tried this out before its refining and they thought pretty unanimously that the game could benefit from a fixed GUI as well as a game menu. I also had explained that as this was a school project, some of the aspects were limited to a finite amount of time. So what could be done and what should be done may not be one in the same. Overall, I met as many of their suggestions as best as possible with this being the final result after the refining stage.
As stated above, I made changes to the GUI and menu system. I added a credits screen for a whole experience. I also made changes to the red flash effect for when the player has taken damage, I also sped it up. I made a few changes to the health module to speed up the transfer of damage from code to blueprint. I also added some volume blocking masses around some of the mesh objects. I made a few changes to the robot AI running around fixing a few bugs that were preventing them from taking damage. Overall, I do believe it looks better, but to make it a more full game for lack of a better word, I would need to add the rest of the components I had set out to design. Though at the time, I just didn't realize how much time would go into it.
