Educational Game

Adobe Character Animator is a very good piece of software, you can animate from your facial expressions, so when you speak the character on screen also moves his mouth which is very good if you want to animate the character to speak a few lines of sentences. With the press of a few buttons, you can also control the characters’ movements.

However, after going through the tutorial and all its steps I tried to export the footage but you can only export in video format and none that would help our game which is a  big issue in why we can’t use this software. If we can find a way around this problem then we will be sure to use this software to aid our game production.

– Dylan

Recently Dylan and I have tested Unity to see how it would fit in with our project. We found it to be rather difficult and we felt it was quite out of our reach for our timeframe, and thus decided it wasn’t to be the software we will be using.

Unity goes over our heads at this stage as we are completely new to game development so we have set it aside for now but we aim to progress to work with Unity in the future. Maybe if we came up with this idea at the beginning of the year we may have had more time to spend and learn the software but for now we can’t spend too much time learning Unity when we can go for a much simpler approach with similar outcome.

We are going to explore Construct 2 and Canvas for HTML5 to create a more fitting and more optimised 2D game.

– Ryan

Although these designs are basic it has allowed us to get an even better view on how the game will work. For example, if you click start, it goes straight to the game, How to play goes to the screen which gives you all the information and tools to play, settings will allow you to customise the game experience and finally if you click the website, it will take you to the partnering website. Adobe XD has allowed us to get away from the boring old wireframes and allowed us to add interactivity so we can get an even better feel for the whole scope of how the game will run. This is just a basic wireframe which we can change and add to once we know what capabilities we have when making our game.

Today I stumbled across an article written by Gustavo Monforte, lead developer at Fat Panda Games which talked about the 5 lessons he learned while developing their first game – Flat Kingdom.

I think this article can be of some use to us while creating our game. We will be able to see points where professionals went wrong and avoid those mistakes. We will also be able to pick up many tips from the industry. Even if just as a reference guide I think this will be useful.

To view the article, click here.

– Ryan

This morning I have been working on designing the in-game pick up… The R.A.M.

I searched on Google for R.A.M to get an idea of how I wanted it to look and I also looked at cartoon style drawings. I initially begun by designing a 3D-looking image before deciding that our game will be 2D so it would look out of place.

Here is my first complete design. I will be having a discussion with Dylan about how he feels, whether he likes it or can suggest any improvements before developing further if need be.

I am happy with how it looks and I’m confident that it will be clear to see and understand what it is while in-game and in the world we create. I think that even if the player has never seen a stick of R.A.M before they will easily be able to identify this as a computer component or something of the sort.

Personally after having looked at the design, I think it could potentially benefit from being thinner, and maybe longer. It looks a little tall and chunky, whereas R.A.M is typically fairly thin and long.

– Ryan