Final Evaluation

3D Environment

I believe that the assets that I have created do reflect the genre for our 3D environment, as they can be typically seen in adventure types of games. In the end, the 3D environment that both myself and my partner have created, does resemble both of our initial ideas and concepts we had created at the beginning of the project. The main things that we kept the same, include having a varied terrain, to give the environment a more realistic feeling, as well as having three main areas to make the player feel as if they are embarking on a quest, with the genre for our game environment being adventure. These three main areas include a small village, a castle and a vast forest, which also includes a dark forest. The things we decided to change throughout the design process were seemingly small, although the decisions themselves made our 3D environment more realistic. These things included the way the village houses looked, and also the location of the moat and cave to make them more of a hazard to the player, if the environment was in a game.

With our target audience being gender neutral and 7-11 year olds, I believe that our 3D environment would be suitable, with its overall simplistic layout and art style. In addition to this, I believe that our target audience would enjoy traversing through our environment because of these reasons, with the main draw to our environment being the large castle, situated on a even larger hill. The main reason for this is because it is the main focal point in the environment, due to its sheer size and towering appearance. The area of our environment which I believe our target audience will find most boring/unattractive is the forests, due to them being over a vast amount of land, which therefore the player is less likely to explore.

When creating the blueprint for our 3d environment, the design choices we made with our genre in mind, being adventure, included multiple levels of terrain, in order to give the player a varied range of hazards to overcome, if the environment featured in a game. In conjunction with this, when creating the blueprint we looked at the hazards in which could present themselves out in the wild, such as crossing a river, and also escaping vast woodland. By doing this, I believe that the layout of our environment does indeed cater for the type of gameplay that you would typically see in an adventure based game. With this in mind, I believe that there are no areas in our environment which wouldn't wok for an adventure game, as they could all pose as a hazard for the player to overcome.

The aspects of our environment which would make the theme, being fantasy, more recognisable to the player, can be seen in the castle and dark forest. In order to make the environment fit the theme more closely, we could have also included collectibles, and also enemies, in the form of our own created beasts or creatures. The design choices we have made in regards to our theme include having our featured castle, village and dark forest be loosely based on historical context. As well as this, the colour choices we made for our 3D environment are also quite bright, in order to make it appeal more to a fantasy interested audience.

3D Assets

The assets that I have created for our 3D environment, I believe closely resemble the assets that both myself and my partner planned at the beginning of the project. This is mainly due to the fact that we initially had very similar ideas as to what we wanted our assets to look like, for things such as the castle and village houses. The things we mainly kept the same, included having both our village and castle areas being loosely based on an existing village and castle. However, things such as the textures of the houses were later changed in the design process, in order to make our environment fit the fantasy theme more so, than being something solely based on what a castle or village house would have looked like historically.

I believe that the assets i personally created for our 3D environment would appeal to our target audience, being gender neutral 7-11 year olds. My reason for this is because we used a voxel art style, similar to that seen in Minecraft, to convey a range of simple but also interesting assets which would attract a younger audience. In addition to this, I believe the asset that our target audience would enjoy most, would be the castle asset, mainly due to the fact of its overall size and presence, with it being the main focal point within our 3D environment.

I believe that the assets that I have created do reflect the genre for our 3D environment, as they can be typically seen in adventure types of games. With this in mind, I also believe that the assets I have created do indeed fit our environment, as they are all typically seen within games of films with the same genre and/or theme.

I believe that the assets I have made are suitable for the theme that we selected , as they are all loosely based on historic context, but with some unique differences, in order to relate back to the fantasy theme, which is made up of a lot of non-fictional based places and environments. As well as this, with are chosen art style being voxel based, this also helps to ensure that our assets fit the fantasy theme as they are not too realistic.

Research

For this project, I researched our audience, genre and theme by specifically looking at what would interest both males and females between the ages of 7 and 11 years old, such as movies, books and games, whilst also looking at the codes and conventions of both our theme (fantasy) and genre (adventure). This was useful to both the development of our 3D environment and our 3D assets as it meant that we could use what we found to be of interest to our target audience to help inspire our choices of what we wanted our environment to look and feel like. In addition to this, components such as the choice of colours could be narrowed down even more, as we also had a better understanding of how to attract our target audience. Furthermore, by carrying out this research, it meant that both myself and my partner gained a better understanding of our target audience and how we could ensure that what we were making would appeal to our target audience. In order to improve our research methods and approach, I believe that we should have carried out more experimentation research to see what we could have improved even further, when designing both our 3D assets and our 3D environment.

Personal Development

I believe that the areas in which I have improved throughout this project are in 3D modelling, planning and also level design. My main reasons for this is that I have had no prior experience in using Maya or Unity, whilst I have also learnt to plan more effectively by using my research as inspiration, and also to support my ideas and decisions. The programmes I have learnt to use in this project are Unity and Maya, where I have learnt to create a 3D environment, 3D model and texture objects. During the process of learning these programmes, one of the challenges that I had to overcome, included creating a cave for our 3D environment as we couldn't achieve the shape we wanted. To overcome this, we created a different shaped cave along the edge of our 3D environment using the paint brush tool to create a circular shape from mountains. I believe that the skills I would need to develop further would be in drawing asset planes and time management. I believe that the skills and knowledge that I developed during this project will help me with my future education/career, as I can now turn level design blueprints into actual 3D environments, meaning I can now produce both 2D and 3D gaming assets and environments. Overall, the things that went well, included a detailed level design blueprint and also detailed research into our target audience, genre and theme. If we had more time or an opportunity to start again, I believe we would need to improve by creating a wider range of assets, in order to show our full capabilities.