Unreal Tournament Forums - Trial by fire

I have submitted my map idea to the Unreal Tournament forums for feedback from the community and am awaiting replies.

https://forums.unrealtournament.com/showthread.php?23292-CTF-DM-CyberMall

Design DunDoc and Trello

To present the design and track development I have created a DunDoc and a Trello.

DunDoc: https://www.dundoc.com/project/1041/2djwdoqfwb

Trello Board: https://trello.com/b/wFWyxcPd

Game Design Document Research

To ensure a game development project goes smoothly and to ensure that all involved at all levels, not just hose on the dev team, but including management, marketing, etc. are on the same page, a Game Design Document should be produced.

This document lists in detailed, but understandable language, all of the features of the game, including story, characters, environments and levels, gameplay, art description, sound, user interface and controls as well as what needs to be coded.

Presentation modification

As part of my peer feedback I had to modify my presentation to help people who may not have a full understanding of the Cyberpunk theme.

I added a extra slide to the middle of my presentation to help with this and obviously I would also talk about it in detail if I were to present again.

Presentation Peer Review - Action Plan

The only major complaint about my presentation is that it should have made a point of describing what the Cyberpunk theme entailed for people who were not in the know.

To rectify this I will add an extra slide with a brief bullet pointed description of Cyberpunk with references to non-gaming cyberpunk franchises, for example Bladerunner, Akira, etc.

For my map design, the general feedback was positive with no immediate design changes suggested by the peer group. Although this may change later down the line, I will not be modifying my map design at this point.

CyberMall - Map idea presentation and peer reviews

Today I presented my map proposal to the class. This was to inform them of my map theme and design idea, the Cyberpunk Mall.

Presentation Peer Review

From the peer review of the actual presentation, I found the feedback to be extremely positive, citing that I spoke clearly and was very concise and to the point with how my information was presented. Everyone got what I was trying to convey. The main small criticism was that in my presentation I didn't help people who may have been less familiar with concept of cyberpunk. I could have made a single extra slide explaining the concept with a couple of non-gaming references to this concept, such as using Bladerunner and Akira.

General Peer Feedback - Idea

Later in the lesson, we had a peer review cycle on the actual map idea and theme. Based on feedback from other classmates, the reaction is again extremely positive, with people interested in the design and theme and even one person saying they would help me work on assets if the design got taken any further.

Direct Peer Review - Idea and Questions

In a forum post, I asked for feedback on the general layout, whether some interaction would be beneficial to the map and maybe the introduction of a timed event, for example a power cut. In general people were happy with the layout, but it was suggested that it could be a little linear. I had considered adding some corners into the map layout earlier, but I thought it best to wait until after some gameplay tests to make changes to the map layout. For suggestions on interaction, I received the suggestion of lifts, which again is something I had considered and even have spaces on my map for them to go, but again I had decided to wait for some playtest feedback before adding these. The power cut idea was considered to be good in general, but that there should be a reason for it.

Conclusion and Evaluation

In all I am pretty happy with how today went, with positive reactions to both how the presentation was given and the map idea itself. I think I can improve in a few areas, as I could have given my presentation a bit more practice and I know now that in presentation that I shouldn't assume that everyone knows what something is, even if everyone you know does.

Presentation creation 3

I felt that my presentation was missing a really standout thing.

I remembered that paintovers were common for level prototypes, so I tried my hand at it.

I took a greyscale render of a section of the level

Then I just used photoshop to paste in photographic elements and paint over and some layer filters for the glows, and the result is below