Firstly, in my proposal I aimed to create a “basic top-down 2D pixel art level”, one set in a “post-apocalyptic scenario”. I mainly selected this as I didn’t enjoy nor was I very good at both programming and 3D modelling. I chose the post-apocalyptic setting as it felt well suited to the given topic of ‘Rebirth’ as it’s usually associated with creatures such as the living dead. Within my proposal, I also stated that I planned to create “items such as broken down vehicles, a set of weapons, ground textures and other assets”. Looking back, I can see that I’ve stuck fairly strongly to my original proposal blog, without any major changes along the way, only further developing and adding ideas through further research as seen in my blogs.
However, not everything remained unchanged. I said early on in my proposal that “I hope to animate various zombie sprites”. I ended up not going with this after I was running out of time and there was very little point to animating characters since I would be presenting my work on boards, not in a game, so you wouldn’t actually end up seeing it in action anyways. The same is applied to when I said, “If I have any time, albeit unlikely, I could load my assets into Unity and program basic player movement” in order to “roam around the level”, this idea was also scrapped due to finishing my pixel art just a week before the final deadline and that the gameplay would have been too simplistic to be worth displaying.
For my research in my proposal, I initially began by creating 2 mind maps, exploring the options and directions I could go with ‘Rebirth’ and ‘2D Game Genres’. In this I explored various movies and games that are related to the themes of rebirth, along with real religious ideologies and scientific findings.
I then followed this up by creating two mood boards exploring the themes of ‘Rebirth’ then followed up by one for ‘The Living Dead’ after seeing the involvement that fiction has with zombies within the topic of ‘Rebirth’. This helped set the tone of my project and brainstorm ideas, ones that would eventually make its way into my proposal.
In later blog posts, I explored the different varieties of top-down game styles, mostly featuring pixel art. This helped inform the pixel art style I ended up developing. One section of research that I found particularly useful was in my blog ‘Exploring Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes’, in which I looked at how the apocalypse is portrayed in different forms of media. I looked at the game The Last of Us, the TV series The Walking Dead, and movies Mad Max: Fury Road and 28 Days Later, in these I looked at how the world has changed, from the empty desert wastelands of Mad Max to the wildly overgrown plant-life of The Last of Us. This research dictated the colour palette very much and the mood I ended up going with, as I felt most inspired by the desolate, broken down world of The Walking Dead.
During the project, I mostly managed my time using the website Trello, creating a series of boards/tasks that I could drag into different sections of which I named “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Completed” so that I can easily track my progress. The Trello boards are also extremely easy to navigate and update. I then used these boards to create project management blogs, most of which were done weekly except for a couple of weeks in which not much progress was to be reported. Another method I used to help manage my development was the initial Project Action Plan and Timetable put together in my proposal, it helped function as a basic plan to follow to make sure I don’t get off track.
Throughout this project, I mainly used 2 skills. Firstly, I used basic paper and pencil sketching to create the first test pieces and designs for assets such as weapons and vehicles, I also utilized the technique of shading to give the sketches depth and texture. I then used Photoshop to further develop and complete the assets, turning the early sketches into fully fledged pixel art. Within Photoshop, I mainly stuck to tools such as the pencil tool for details and outlines of assets, the fill tool to fill in the outlines with basic colours, and the eyedropper tool to manage and adjust the colours. I also created a new layer whenever I felt I had finished creating a part of an asset, this allowed me to go back and make changes or see how my assets developed by enabling and disabling different layers; essentially working as checkpoints. The work done in Photoshop ended up being completed entirely using a keyboard and mouse.
When developing this project, I inevitably ran into a couple of issues. Firstly, I ran into a brief issue in which I lost some of my PowerPoint mood boards after accidentally saving in the shared drive. Towards the end of this project, I ran into a few issues with WordPress, mainly it was to do with my blogs either being categorised wrongly or forgetting to categorise them altogether, this can be attributed to me not clicking the ‘Update’ button within WordPress. This meant that I had to go back through my blog and recategorize everything, fortunately it’s now been fixed. The largest issue I encountered was my lack of project development on my blog, mainly developing the ideas of ‘Rebirth’ following my project proposal. I ended up creating blogs exploring the enemy types found in various post-apocalyptic games, who the target audience is, and how colour effects an audience; I made these all in the last weeks of the project, long after they were supposed to be submitted. I was also behind on other blog posts for my sketches and project management too, although it was to a lesser extent. My final project boards ended up going through a few iterations before they were ready for display.
From this project, I’ve learnt that I should keep my blogs more frequently updated with project development and management. I also feel I spent too little time on many blogs, often leading to many of them missing out on any reflective paragraphs, missing out on any overall conclusion to most posts. Overall, the poor time management in terms of blog work really led to a drop in quality or many posts being lost altogether. This had somewhat of a knock-on effect on my assets, as towards the end of the project I spent a large portion of time going back to complete essential work that was missing.
At each Interim Deadline, I had a colleague look at my progress and give feedback on a sheet which grades the tasks in the unit as either a referral, satisfactory, good or excellent. The sheets also contained boxes for strengths and weaknesses in order to give constructive criticism. Using these, I managed to address many of the issues in my Photoshop work and particularly in my blogs.
On the whole, I found this project to be enjoyable. I mainly attribute this to the pixel art I did for previous units, meaning I was familiar with the style and themes, only this time from a top-down perspective. I also enjoyed that this project felt much more open to in terms of ideas and concepts to go with, as ‘Rebirth’ is a very vague term and that you can go with a variety of different options to display your work whether that be programming a game or 3D modelling.
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