Project Overview and Reflection
This blog will contain a rundown of my overall experience with this project, my thoughts and feelings, things I enjoyed and didn't as well as things I felt could be improved or what went really well!
Our Game Submission
For this project, my group submitted our visual novel which was a game based upon our MC, who created imaginary friends to help themselves cope with their mental illnesses. Our game focused on what its like for those who deal with mental illness on a day to day basis, as well as about reaching out and that it is okay to ask for help. Overall, I felt that we respectfully created a game based on our original idea, and I'm happy with our end result. I felt that the last portion of our submission was slightly rushed, as we had a lot to do between the 3 members of our group who actively contributed. Spreading the work among the 3 of us was quite a lot but we managed to produce something that I feel is well made and a respectful storytelling like we originally wanted. We published our game on a site called Itch.io, so it is easily accessible to anyone who is interested in playing via downloading through our itch.io page.
Overall Thoughts on the Project
Overall, I actually really enjoyed this project. Despite our group having a few issues mainly with people not carrying their weight, I felt that our group did really well despite this. I really enjoyed the brief itself, and I personally really enjoyed the game creation process. Seeing our ideas slowly take shape and be created was a really rewarding process, especially when it came to coding. After our assets were added into our game, playing through it even just as the beta/alpha was really exciting. I personally really enjoyed Ren'py and the game creation process, and this is something I could defiently see myself being interested in or wanted to do again. Sometimes I feel like I don't really know what exactly I would like to do within the gaming industry, but I really enjoyed this project and feel like its defiently helped to push me in a direction of what type of things I'd like to go on to make. I feel that I will continue to practice with Ren'py and possible create my own visual novel style game using the skills I learnt within the software as a personal project.
Things that went Well
In our group, I felt that the 3 of us all worked really hard. We encountered a lot of problems, and we were all quite concerned about the production of our game as for the majority of the time, It felt like there were only 3 of us working on it, instead of 6. Despite this, I think the 3 of us did a good job managing out our missing members work and took matters into our own hands to make sure our game was complete to a standard we felt compelled with. We conducted weekly meetings either in class or during the week on days we weren't at uni to call and discuss our tasks for the week. We also kept in contact with each other very frequently, to ask for help when needed, give feedback, help with blogs or to work on the development of our game and assets together. Despite all that happened I am proud of our group and what we accomplished.
Things that could be Improved
As pleased as I am with the results of our group, there are still defiently things I felt could be improved. Firstly, despite us putting a lot of effort into our game, I felt that there were still areas that could be improved. For a few examples, In some parts when background characters are talking, they do not have fully illustrated sprites like the rest of the characters. This isn't game breaking, but it could really help with the emersion. Another example could be the background music. Our game had one track that looped constantly throughout the game. Originally we wanted to add unique music and sounds effects but we ultimately ran out of time to add them. I feel that small little features such as those could drastically improve the play through of our game. If we had more time as well, I would've liked to possibly make some of our endings longer, or even add some more as certain routes felt very short.
Another thing I felt we could've improved on as a group is our group cooperation. For the majority of our project, especially the portion of our project after Christmas it felt that half of our group stooped participating, and never finished the work they were assigned, never giving updates of feedback on the multiple things they were asked to do leaving us to complete their work.
Problems and Challenges we Faced
Our biggest challenge as a group was our other members cooperation. This causes us a lot of problems as well as worry and stress due to the lack of communication and work we received. Despite this, I felt that our remaining group did a good job of balancing the leftover work out and completing it to a high standard that we were all happy with.
We had to change a lot of features of our game, and change ideas around in order to be able to complete our project effectively within the time we had left. This posed as a challenge for us as we had to rewrite and change around a lot of the existing information we already had prepared for our game. As well as this, we had to keep constantly changing roles between the 3 of us to make sure the work was completed and all tasks were assigned to somebody.
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