In conclusion, I think working on this project, CA and Blog went pretty well. Brief was very clear, in sense that from the start we knew what we had to do. From the very star I broke down my blog into sections, gave them names and made plan on what to put in each section. What made it easier for me before hand is that we already done some of the things for Professional Practice module and we were allowed to use them for this CA as well (for example – research data and paper prototypes for the game). When it comes to this project, I personally believe that I should put more effort into creating personas, or at least, make them more detailed.

Teamwork

For this project, my partner is Dylan Chan and so far, we did not have any major issues while working together. Of course, in any teamwork there will be issues and arguments as everyone is trying to push their ideas first, but even when Dylan and I had misunderstandings we managed to work it through and get our work done. We divided our work evenly, both were included in creating personas and prototypes and made sure we completed our tasks on time. We made sure to look over each others work for this project and advise each other if there should be any changes and so. We also helped each other a lot, by sending images, links, examples – to make it easier for ourselves. As a result of this we managed to get everything done way before the original submission date, due to me leaving country for the last week of this term, which also, makes Dylan a great project partner, since beside all of his CAs he agreed on doing this with me earlier and putting a lot of effort in it.

In this section, I will talk about the personas and paper prototype that we created for this project. I will also talk about how we came up with personas, how we decided who is going to be our target audience for this game and I will also show the process of creating personas. For this project, we came up with two personas and one final persona. From the research we done for this project, we got the information that majority of people who would use our game are between ages of 18 to 24 and 24 to 35. Based on that data, we decided to focus on creating one persona that will represent a minor and one that will represent young adult , and final persona will be in between when it comes to age but with mixed characteristics of persona 1 and 2. When it comes to Paper Prototype of the game, I will show two version of paper prototype and explain the functionality of the game.

Persona 1 – Tom Byrne

First persona that we created is called Tom Byrne, he is sixteen year old Leaving Cert student from Dublin. While doing our research, we were not allowed to collect data from minors because of ethical reasons, we agreed on creating one persona that will be underage because we showed some of our ideas to our younger family members and they seemed to like it, and also, we believe that teenagers (from 13 to 17) would be very interested in our game.

As I already said, Tom Byrne is a sixteen year old student from Dublin. Tom is goofy, extrovert and funny. He does not have a part-time job because he is very focused on his studies. When it comes to his hobbies he plays rugby, games and spends quite a lot of time on social media. He lives with his parents and feels a lot of pressure from them because they want him to do well in his exams. His goals are to finish his exams, get into college ,play more games with friends again and spend more time with them. Tom is good when it comes to understanding technology, as he plays games a lot and uses a lot of other different software. His gaming skills are excellent, as he plays a lot of different games and understands them easily, as well as his social skills, since he enjoys playing multiplayer games and likes to spend time with his friends overall. Beside all that, Tom is under a lot of stress. His Leaving Certificate exams are this year and he is forced to put his hobbies to the side. Tom needs something that will help him relax, have his attention and would not take much of his time. Our game, Final Saviour, would be perfect for Tom since it does not require from user to spend to much time on playing it, but it is also interesting and will have his full attention, so hopefully, it will help him forget about his problems for a while.

Persona 2 – Mark O’Connor

For our second persona we created Mark O’Connor, 22 year old programmer. From our research for this project, Mark falls into the group of people between ages of 18 and 24, young adults, with possible gaming history, who would like to play our game. Although we are mainly targeting teenagers, we believe that young adults would also be a good target audience since most of them were teens when two-dimensional games were at it’s prime, and would appreciate something that would remind them of their childhood.

Mark is 22 years old postgraduate student of Computer Science and is very into playing games. He has been playing games ever since he was a child. His favorite game is Resident Evil, but he also enjoys two-dimensional games like Rayman – his favorite game from childhood. He still plays a lot of games. He is very familiar with different styles of game design and thinks that graphics and game art are really important. He mostly plays games on his professional gaming PC and prefers playing it alone rather than with his group of friends. His game might be of interest to him as he likes to try new and different games and explore different game stories and characters. Mark needs that will he find interesting and new or will not remind him of the stuff he played before. Possibly even something that will make him research game style and design and hope for more of games like that to come out. Our game would be great for Mark because it is created in two-dimensional mode, and would remind him of his younger days, also the story of the game might be interesting to him.

Persona 3 (Final Persona) – Ally Jameson

Persona of Ally is a mix of both our two previous personas – Tom and Mark, but also she is a person for herself. We have decided to create a female persona as today, it is not only boys who play games and who are interested in how games work, but girls too. Persona like Ally, would not only represent someone who is interested in games, but also the overall art and how is it designed.

Ally Jameson is a 23 year old three-dimensional model designer from Liverpool, United Kingdom. She studied Game Design and Concept Art and is very creative person. Ally is living with her husband and works as Concept Artist. She is very honest, critical, artsy, outgoing and creative. Her hobbies are drawing, painting,hiking, gymnastics and playing games. Her goal is to work on herself and become better artist than she is now, as well as to find new art that will inspire her. She is good at both technology and gaming, and her social skills are impressive. Our game would be interesting to someone like Ally as it has very nice and specific design and it would probably be something that she would find nice, cute and inspiring.

Paper Prototype of the game

For creating paper prototype of our game, we highly referred to the research we done for this project, focusing on what users would like to see from our game. In this section I will show three paper prototype iterations done for this project. First one will show our idea before we took into account the research and what users want. Second one will show iteration done based on user information and third one, will also focus on user wishes but would not include many details – as we wanted to see what would user get from it, and if user thinks the same as us, prototype is successfully created.

Prototype 1 – Before user research

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Images above are showing the very first prototype iteration of our game. This prototype was created before we even done the research for this project and it represented our initial idea for the game – how we, as developers, would like it to look. Our initial prototype was representing a game that would allow user to choose between three characters to play – Forest Spirit, Guard and Little Forest Fire. Depending on what player user chooses we had an idea to create a completely different game plays for them, so users would have different experiences. From our research later, and discussing our skills when it comes to programming such complex game play, we have decided no to include features mentioned above in our game, since it would take too much time and also users prefer something simpler.

Prototype 2 – Reflecting on user research

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Second iteration of the prototype focused highly on what users want to see from our game. As I said before, we decided to remove features such as three players choice and different game play experiences, so looking at this prototype you can see that we decided to stick with the character of grumpy guard as protagonist of our game. We named him Sergio and decided to make him a very grumpy little man (Image 1, from the gallery above). As we can also see from the images above, game had a completely different title in this prototype and then we decided to change it from Glorious Savior to Final Savior. We also explained his objectives in the game and how will he succeed in them. If we look at the gallery above we can see that this prototype iteration is very detailed and gives users a complete explanation of how game works and what are the possible outcomes if scenarios end up different from what we, as developers are planning to make them look. In our opinion, this seem like a nice prototype since we are creating a game and users do need to know how to play it (have manual for it) in order to do well in a game play. On the other hand one of the lecturers suggested us how we should focus on creating a prototype that will allow user to figure out by himself/herself how to navigate the game and not know what will happen in each scene and this, will lead us to our third and final prototype iteration.

Prototype 3 – Final Prototype

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For our final prototype iteration we have decided to created a little booklet, that will work on a principle of record cards. Page one of booklet is a brief explanation of what it is and what will user see while flicking the pages. When user opens the booklet first thing he/she sees is just an image, no explanation. Then user would be asked what he/she thinks it is what will happen next and so on. If users explanation matches ours we would say we are getting good information from user and if not, we would consider changing stuff later to make it more easier for user to figure out what it is and how it works. Then we would ask user to flick paper again and see the explanation of previous image, so now user knows as well what is going on and can see if he/she was correct.

In this section of the blog, I will talk about inspirations (games, movies, characters…) that influenced my partner and I when it comes to deciding on our final idea for the project. I will also briefly mention the survey we created for the purpose of this project and to get information about what users want and how that too, shaped our final idea. I will include images, screenshot and drawings to give better explanation of what I am going to talk about.

INSPIRATIONS

In this document I will be talking about mobile/ computer game, that had influence on my idea and very much inspired me for this project. I will talk about design, genre and why it is important for me to have a game with good story line.  In this document I will talk about:

• Child of Light –  platforming role-playing video game.
• Looney Tunes – series of animated comedy short films.

• CHILD OF LIGHT

Child of Light was the first game that came up to my mind when I started thinking of what kind of game I should make for my project.  As someone who plays games, It is really important for me that game I play has a good story and design and Child of Light is definitely one of those game.

The game’s story takes place in the fictional land of Lemuria. Game’s main character is called Aurora and the game starts when she wakes up in Lemuria after dying from a mysterious illness. Her objective in the game is to bring back the sun, the moon and the stars that are all being captive by the Queen of the Night in order to return home. On her journey, Aurora is accompanied by many different characters like Rubella, girl who is searching for her brother and many more. As you play a game, you also get to see Aurora growing up, which I really like about this game because it is also a coming of age story. Another interesting thing about this game that some aspects of it are based on reality. For example, Aurora is Austrian princess and her duchy is located in Carnoila and earthquake that hit the Carnoila on Easter Sunday in 1895.

Child of Light had a huge influence on me and my project, mainly because of its very well developed backstory. It is almost like an animated painting, very simple and colorful. Its soft music makes player think that he/she is living a modern fairy-tale while playing a game. Game is made for children, age from 10 to 17, but is also made for adults. As creator of the game said, ‘’ .. it is also made for fans of classic console RPG games…’, who are now adults. That is another thing I would love to achieve with my game – aim for players of every age to play It and enjoy it.

• LOONEY TOONS

Inspiration for my game character I found in Marvin the Martian, Looney Tunes character.  For my game I am planning to create a character called Sergio, grumpy Guard which is highly inspired by Marvin. What I like about the way this character is drawn is that we can’t see his full face, just eyes, and his eyes are usually very grumpy or annoyed looking. It gives us the impression that character thinks everything that is happening around him should be done differently and that he knows a better way of doing things.

SURVEY (Research part )

For the purpose of gathering user information and requirements for project we have created an online survey in Google Forms. At the beginning of the survey, it is explained to the participants what it has about and gave them instructions on how to answer it. The Survey required from participants to watch two short game play videos of our inspirations for the project (Child of Light and Never Alone) and answer questions based on the videos they watched. The Survey started with easy and basic questions about their age groups and their gaming history, and then moved onto the questions about design and ones connected to the videos they have seen.

Information we got from our survey is that:

• From survey we could conclude that the most of our participants (potential game users) fall into the age group between 18 – 24 (we were not able to get information from people who are below age of 18 due to ethical reasons).  Followed by people who fall into the age group between 24 – 35 ( we found this information very interesting)
• Out of 12 responses that we got for on survey, 62.5% of them do play games.
• When it comes to how often they play games on scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 being Not Very Often and 5 being Very Often), the results were equal.
• When it comes to on which device that play the game, 62.5% goes to PC, and it is followed by 37.5% for Mobile Phone.
• On question “What type of games you enjoy the most”, most common answer was Adventure games, followed by Action games.
• They prefer Single player games over Multiplayer games.
• Referring to their answers about two videos that they have watched, most of them said they enjoyed Child of Light game play more than Never Alone game play, as (according to them) game art is better, there is more sounds, seems very mysterious, bright colors and the only critic of this game was that is has too much details.
• 87.5% of participants said that story of the game is important to them, also the soundtrack.
• 62.5% of participants said that game art is important to them, also the same percentage of participants said that they would love cinematic sequences to be included in the game.
• 62.5% of the participants said that they like games which challenge them, meaning that they don’t like getting hints for solving tasks in the game.
• When it comes to multiple main characters our research indicated that it was 50%-50%, which leaves us undecided on this game mechanic.

FINAL IDEA

For final idea, we agreed on creating is a 2D adventure – fantasy game called Final Saviour created in Unity 2D mode. Game is set in a magical and mystical forest called Glorious Forest and follows the story of grumpy, but yet funny forest guard Sergio who has a task to protect it against the dark and evil forces and bring back The Forest Light, thing that makes it magical.  On his way to save the forest player will have to control Sergio and help him defeat the dark forces. For this game we also created very detailed storyboard.

On the image above, we can see the first page of the storyboard for this project. Story is set in the magical forest called Glorious Forest (Drawing 1, top left corner), hidden far away from people. Everyone is living very happily there and no one is worried that something might change that. Thing that keeps forest alive is Forest Light, blue fire that makes everything magical. Forest Light is kept at the top of the castle tower and is guarded by Sergio (Drawing 2, middle top row), grumpy but yet funny forest guard. Sergio does not like his job as much and he believes that it is pointless, since nothing ever happens in the forest and how he has better things to do. But one day, dark spirits escaped the underworld and decided to steal Forest Light and rule the world (Drawing 1, bottom left corner). Once when Sergio fell asleep, Evil Spirits crawled behind his back and stole Forest Light (Drawing 2, middle bottom row). When he woke up, he could not believe what he saw, Forest light was gone and Glorious Forest was dying slowly.