Sunday 16 June 2013

Evaluation and Finished Showreel and Trailer

I entered this module armed with the knowledge I'd gained from my time spent working in a much larger group during our Professional Team Brief module. Specifically, i refer to the realisation that communication and hence a coherent vision is VERY important to success when working with anyone other than yourself, let alone 10 people. Thankfully i have been working with two good friends who I've been able to keep communication with very easily. On their part I believe they both worked very hard and it shows in their work, on my part i believe i have done the same, though it is less obvious as i have simply manipulated and imported rather than creating actual assets.

Despite the coherence in our vision it seems we still had plenty to learn even after spending several months on another project this year, namely being realistic about what we could achieve in a given time frame, and admittedly this was brought to light by our lecturer right from the start but we decided not to heed this warning, though not without reason. I believe we were fairly realistic in our approach to creating a schedule for this project, but the fatal mistake we made was our failure to realise that we would be working on and completing three other modules while this project ran its course. It was around the middle of May when we started having serious doubts, after having to put work on hold while we all focussed on writing essays for another module. Eventually we had to come to terms with the fact that we did not have nearly enough time to achieve our initial vision of a working rally game in a self-made arcade cabinet, an idea that seems slightly laughable looking back now, but the logic was sound in our minds at the time.

So we took a step back and re-evaluated what we could achieve, eventually deciding to get done what we could and compile that into two videos; a showreel of all our assets and a trailer for the game itself.



As you can see we did a fair amount of work overall, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The trailer is admittedly slightly hilarious, but i believe this fits with our satirical take on the 90's arcade rally theme we applied to the game.

I come away from this project having learnt a valuable lesson about time planning when working on a short-term project, as well as a great deal about using Unity. I am proud of what i achieved in the short time-span we had for this project and i enjoyed working in such a tight-knit group.