Evaluation

Introduction

In this blog, I will be referring to my previous work on visual, audio and interactive workshops and reflect and evaluate them and how I felt about the work.

Visual

For the visual element of these workshops, the blogs we made consisted of mainly a lot of animation work, researching game styles we liked and creating our own sprites. In summary, there were few parts of these workshops that I really enjoyed.

Towards the end, researching innovative visual styles in video games was interesting and I got to talk about three video games that I love the styles of, and since I loved them, they were a lot easier to write about. However, from the beginning of animation I knew already that I wasn’t going to enjoy it much.

Animating in Adobe After Effects was a pain in my backside. From the beginning it took me a while to grasp the new software and understand what I was supposed to be doing. At some point it was just easier to watch Gareth and make notes on his progress. I don’t know what it is about animation that I just don’t like. The process seemed incredibly tedious and given that I didn’t enjoy the topic – made it boring and more stressful.

On the bright side, when animating my own sprite (which was easier that I had anticipated), it gave a nice feeling when I was done to see something that I had created, and see it move and act. (Despite the frames being a bare minimum for each animation).

Audio

Audio covered blogs such as researching audio terminology and Foley artists, and creating and using audio in Audition and Unreal Engine. The audio terminology PowerPoint that was shown to us in lesson was useful and easy to follow along to, this made filling in the sub-categories and defining the terminology pretty straight forward. I had initially done some small research on Foley artists in the same blog, however I extended my research further in a new separate blog.

The special effects lesson we had with Lee were pretty entertaining. We had to create sound effects using objects and props around us, this got me to think of what would be the best sound and the most unique sound. This lesson also gave an insight to how Foley artists do their work.

Finally, we learned how to add sounds effects in Audition and Unreal Engine. This work was helpful, and I was able to learn more and understand Unreal Engine blueprinting and how to add audio to a level design, using trigger boxes.

Interactive

The work for this section was a bit more engaging. This helped add some variety to the whole project. We were taught what flipbooks were and how they could be made using Unreal Engine. However compared to other workshops, I don’t remember much about this work – I’d have to refer back to my blogs if I needed guidance with flipbooks in the future. On the other hand, something I do remember would be the process of creating a main menu in Photoshop and Unreal Engine. This process felt pretty lengthy, and the Photoshop work seemed easier that setting up a main menu in Unreal, perhaps this is because I am more familiar with Photoshop.

Tile maps and tile sets in Unreal Engine were taught clear enough. It was fascinating to see the process of creating something for a level and actually adding it to a game, providing a surface to move on. Furthermore, we also learned how to add a background to a 2D based game in UE, and we learned how to create depth in that background.

cONCLUSION

All three different sections of this project taught a variety things and provided a range of different things to learn. I think my most favourite part was the audio and research we completed. In contrast, my least favourite process in this project was certainly the animation work we did. The work felt tedious and in some cases stressful due to the new software and information we had to pick up pretty fast.