Week 2.01: Reflection — Starting the Game Development Module

At the close of the first week of the second module, Game Development, I’m slightly less than a week behind schedule. I make no excuses — this was somewhat intentional, and for very good reason.

Time for a change?

For the next three months, my studies will focus on developing a single game and my personal goal here will be to complete it to the point it could be commercialised and published. Unlike the previous module where we ran two, small rapid ideations (game jams) to develop a prototype, we now have time to delve much deeper into (and gain an appreciation of) many more disciplines. I also want to use this as an opportunity to switch technology. I’ve spent almost a year with Unity and developed five game prototypes todate. Before I get to the major course project in a few months’ time, I’d like to properly evaluate the Unreal Engine as well. This way, at the end of the module I will be able to make an informed choice as to which engine to use for my final project.

Hence the reason why I’m behind schedule. This week has been devoted to learning the basics of Unreal Engine 4 so when I start on the project proper, I can hit the ground running.

The most interesting discovery is that Unreal Engine is far easier to work with than I anticipated. At this point in time, and for the type of project I wish to develop, there isn’t much to choose between either engine: Unity or Unreal.

I feel that if I am to switch engine for this module, now is the only sensible time to do so.

My rationale for really only considering these two offerings was purely mercenary. Both have good traction in the market, sought-after skills, a huge support community and a reasonable licensing model. Of all the other potential solutions these two had the edge.

Technical skill evaluation

Out other primary focus this week was skills evaluation to complement the Technical Skills Audit. This was, to paraphrase one of my colleagues, a great ‘butt-kicker’ activity: I knew where my strengths and weaknesses were but the exercise of reflecting and documenting this really helped to both bring it into sharp focus and also identify which areas I need to concentrate on most.

In more than one of these areas I was initially tempted to give myself a higher rating but on reading the course material on the Dunning-Kruger effect (Dunning, 2017) I adopted a slightly more conservative approach based on this scoring framework:

0 == Complete novice with no skill in this area
5 == Entry level/early career professional
10 == Leading authority, expert in AAA studio

Ironically, the skill I’m most confident about on a day to day basis, programming, is the one I’m most nervous about with this scoring. I rated myself at an 8 in this discipline but if I limit the field to just game development I may need to drop this back to a 7 or even a 6 owing to still getting up to speed with the Unity and Unreal APIs and design patterns.

Looking to the future, my must-have skills centre around game and level design with the support of good narrative design. Over the years, I’ve found modelling and animation to be great fun and very relaxing from my dabbling with Maya 4.5 and more recently Blender. I would still class myself as a novice here though — I know enough to be dangerous rather than productive.

If it’s not tested, it doesn’t work…

…was one of the sayings of Dennis May, the Kernal Architect and inventor of the EKA2 Symbian OS. So it’s with amused embarrassment that I want to follow up on my Search for a Star reflection post and admit I found an amusing little bug during play testing. I’m posting it here as a memory-jogger for the future: when the player kills an NPC, disable the animation or the NPC Death Bug will be the result…

If you shoot a dead NPC, it gets up and dies all over again, doh! Easy to fix, I’m just slightly embarrased I didn’t find it during play testing. The fix was really simple: on NPC death, disable the animation trigger. I’m not quite sure how I missed it as I’d already removed one defect with the NavMesh where on NPC death, it would slide along the floor and up/down staircases until it reached its destination. This was in exactly the same area of code and not something I would have normally overlooked.

Which brings me to my next point:

Mental fatigue…

The last few weeks have been incredibly intense and I’m feeling completely drained and disillusioned. Search for a Star was really great fun and rewarding. I achieved a huge amount but at a cost. I also made the error of not taking time out this week to recharge and regroup, choosing instead to immerse myself in a crash course on Unreal Engine in readiness for the Global Game Jam.

That wasn’t the wisest of decisions. My ego got the better of me I’m afraid and I feel now its time to focus more on long term gain rather than short term glory, to rest up and have a break.

List of Figures

Figure 1. THORN, 2021 Skill Evaluation Matrix

Figure 2. THORN, 2021 NPC Death Bug

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash