The second assessed portion of this Connected Games module was to create an interim presentation to demonstrate our progress so far on the project since our preliminary progress update presentation. Here I will show each of the slides from our presentation, along with some explanation for the decisions we made.
Here is our title page, featuring some introductory info such as the game's title, the names of each team member, the module title, and snappy tagline to put forward the game's theme. We were considering typing to come up with a new title but we felt as though Knock Off was short, snappy and descriptive enough for a project like this and any other ideas we could think of seemed a bit forced, as though we were just changing the name for the sake of it. If we can come up with something a bit less generic then we would be willing to swap it, but for now we are sticking with Knock Off. Our new tagline "The Universe's wackiest gameshow!" was an addition I made. Due to our game being more mechanically focused and narrative-light, and our current lack of art asset implementation, I felt it was important to remind everyone of the game's thematic premise from the outset. This is were the tagline comes in. The title efficiently describes our gameplay focus, and our tagline summarises our setting. Together, this hopefully gives a clear picture of what you should expect from the game straight away. Our presentation's colour scheme also helps in this regard. The black background mimics space, implying the loosely sci-fi setting, and providing contrast to the colourful text, making it more eye-catching without being too garish. The font choice also helps to reinforce the light-hearted, comedic tone.
Here we clearly laid out the core mechanical premise of the game and explained our three game-modes. This summarises each gameplay loop, ensuring that everybody can understand the type of gameplay they should expect.
In this next slide I detailed all of the movement abilities available to the player so that our audience could understand the full scope of how mobile I have designed out characters to be. Since we were on the topic of movement and platforming, now seemed a fitting time to show each of the different obstacles I have designed to impede player progress. This slide, and the next were quite challenging to create as I needed to summarise my very in-depth design documentation in a way that allowed me to demonstrate our progress quickly and simply while still showing how extensively detailed my design work has been.
This slide was also done by me, as it summarised my design documentation, similarly to the previous slide. Here I showed off each of the weapons that I have designed, including both of their firing modes. This was intended to make it clear that, despite the simplicity of the core gameplay loop, the physics based combat mechanics can provide a lot nuance and playstyle variations. With the core gameplay systems explained, I moved on to our secondary objective systems, coins and power ups. It was stressed to us that we needed to show our understanding of game economies and I think that this system serves that purpose, as well as allowing us to flex our level-design muscles by using these to guide players through the map. I am aware that both this slide and the previous one are very text-heavy. As my work on the project up until now has consisted of extremely detailed design documentation, I still maintain that this was the best way to illustrate my contribution. In the interest of time and screen-space, I did all I could to cut down the text as much as possible, but unfortunately it seemed as though it was still found to be a little wordy for our audience. If we had more gameplay implemented at this stage then perhaps less text would have been required to get my points across, as videos could have been used instead.
This slide was created by my fellow designer, Tanishka, as she is taking the lead on the artistic side of things, as opposed to my more mechanically-focused approach. Here we showed off our bright, diverse colour palette and cartoonish art style, designed to reinforce the casual, fun nature of Knock Off. This slide also featured images of each of the art assets we have decided to implement. The level design sketch on the right was created by me after a brainstorming session Tanishka and I had. We discussed various ideas regarding what levels we should create for each of our gameplay modes but ultimately settled on a singular, arena-style map on which both core modes would be played. This saves our team time and resources and removes the potentially linear nature of a normal race-mode map. Players will start the match at one of the green spawn zones and then use their mobility to traverse the white platforms. This map features large amounts of water, which serves as the "Danger Zone", meaning that players will be temporarily eliminated for falling into it. Elimination will incur a short delay before respawning the player at a spawn zone. The yellow regions of the map indicate potential race mode objective locations.
This slide was created entirely by Tanishka, and demonstrates a prototype menu flow. We also intended to show off some of the music and sound effects we will be implementing, but unfortunately there were technical issues which prevented this during the presentation. The audio is featured in the PowerPoint though so those marking our presentation should be able to take a listen. As with our art assets, the audio is supposed to be comedic and evoke positive feelings from the player.
With this slide, Suhas explained the choices our programmers had made regarding our online-multiplayer functionality.
Mira then took the lead with this slide, explaining the gameplay implementation process while showing a video of the game in its current state. The multiplayer functionality has been our programmers' focus thus far, meaning it works very well, and we were able to show multiple remote players interacting in a scene. The focus on nailing this aspect and the choice to opt for the most advanced multiplayer set up available has unfortunately meant that the actual gameplay mechanics are currently quite bare-bones, and our art implementation is non-existent. Despite some negative feedback on how the game currently looks, our programmers remain confident that, as the difficult part (multiplayer) has been done, they will be able to implement the rest of the game before our deadline, resulting in a high-quality product.
With our penultimate slide, we took the time to lay out our plan, week by week, for what each member of the team will need to accomplish in order to complete this project to our desired standard. This slide being mandated was actually very helpful to us, as to construct this slide we needed to have an extensive team meeting in which we worked out a comprehensive strategy to achieve our aims for this module. As you can see, having finished designing our core gameplay systems my role at this point will be shifting to testing the implemented systems, providing feedback to our programmers and adjusting our design documentation to reflect any changes I request. My background in QA testing and gameplay programming will help me with this as it will allow me to easily spot issues and provide potential solutions.
Our final slide simply provided links to each of the resources and tools we have used thus far.
All in all, I was reasonably happy with our interim presentation. Our feedback on the day was mixed due to our lack off art implementation and my over-use of text necessitated by our lack of gameplay implementation, but I don't view this as a negative. The process of creating this presentation has highlighted our current weakness for us and allowed us to form a comprehensive plan going forward to make this game as good as it can be.
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