Evaluation

This project has been a big leap forward for me, learning 2 3D software programs ( Maya and UDK editor) and integrating this with my knowledge of animation has given me the skills to produce a playable game that includes everything from sounds, character animation and scripting events to occur with player interaction that culminates in an immersive 3D world. This has given me a strong grounding to further explore immersion with more interaction between players and the story.

The most time consuming part of the project was discovering ways to overcome all the problems I encountered. At times there were issues that had obvious work around type "solutions", for example, looping segments in the UDK animation editor matinee prevented me from adding in additional animation sequences to play afterwards, taking the time to investigate the problem and find a better, quicker solution not only helped increase the quality of the game I made but will also streamline this process in the future.

Encountering problems leads to an increased knowledge of the software and eventually gave me more control over what I was doing. Another example of this was due to clipping in the UDK editor, caused by me playing around with the controls and not knowing what I was doing, it took me absolutely ages of reading up on UDK documentation to figure out what I had done, it turned out to be easily fixable. However just trying to solve a single problem led me to knowledge about configuring visibility of static meshes within the game as well as useful stream lining tips which I would have not otherwise encountered.

After some initial compatibility issues with introducing my animation sequences in to the UDK I had a working walk cycle, changing the direction that my character was facing to the direction he was walking in was solved by changing his rotation. Ideally I would have liked the direction of my character automated to face the direction he is walking in, making it quicker to control the walk path, this is something I will investigate further in the future.

Future development. A genre that I feel has a lot of potential (if executed correctly) A film/story that allows for interaction with the player, the difference between this and any other video game containing a story would be much more focus on the dialogue, narrative and visuals than a typical game which involves combat or quests which you spend the majority of your time going through to get short snippets of the story in the form of cut scenes.

The thought behind this is that there exists a large group of people that have no interest in shooting bad guys but do wish to immerse themselves in a story in a video game setting without the distraction of challenges. The deus ex series is a great example of this, the story and sound effects were great, but I can't remember how I got past the 20th group of people shooting at me.