Evaluation

Overall to conclude I feel I’d made a lot of great progress towards the game concept of Pippy’s Bird-Person Shooter. I created a solid proposal, games design document, pitch, prototype menu, promotional video and other pieces of artwork (like menus) for said game. As explained in the previous development entries, my research into all these different game design theories, as well as with me physically playing and analysing games in my gameplay journal, has helped me realise what elements really work in a game (like customisation and variety) and what don’t (such as repetitive gameplay mechanics and tedious rules).

I feel with all these materials collated I’ve come up with a very creative and innovative game in Pippy’s Bird-Person Shooter, as it fills the void in the games industry and fits snugly into a largely untapped market in the video game world (colourful shooter games for both adults and children). It’s a very feasible game idea, especially since it has the recognisable and iconic characters in that water-coloured visual style, to make them easily recognisable at a glance, giving it a good potential boost in popularity. I’ve also followed various professional practises when creating all of these materials, such as the healthbar in the gameplay screenshot being a heart (commonly used in semiotics to represent health) and my pitch not being too long and wordy, which is a great example of my personal development as I’ve spent so much time researching all these different elements and I applied them effectively- which is something that would be done in industry.

Creating these assets has even helped me improve my skills with different pieces of software, like Photoshop for my gameplay screens and Powerpoint for my menus as I used them for many hours at a time. I learned a variety of different skills using those pieces of software, such as blending transparency, various keyboard shortcuts for different tools and how apply layer masks in Photoshop to give things a unique look. In Powerpoint I also learned various keyboard shortcut and also many good ways to structure your pitches (like having questions at the end and using the text on the slide mainly for notes). These are skills I can take forward with me into the future, and apply them into different assignments in the course, and into the workplace beyond that.

Overall to conclude I feel I’ve created a fine set of work that really showcase many angles of my game idea (from the plot/story, to the concept to the game’s main menu). I’ve ended up with a good quality concept here that has the potential to be taken into the future, and with a well-rounded development team behind it the game could be a great success!