Week 3 Summary!

In week 3, I understood the roles and the amount of work I had to produce, In the workshop I learnt how to shoot and create jump pads, I knew immediately I wanted shooting in my game and various other mechanics, so using some of the free assets provided by Epic games I started to build my prototype level for my game. 

Pitch Documents 

Pitch Documents is basically showing your design/game idea to buyers/audiences/investors.  It's covers a number of areas that go into creating a game in short and simply slides and gives the audience an idea of what game your creating.  Most pitch documents go over such topics such as:

1. Title and Cover art

2. Synopsis

3. Narrative

4. Characters

5. Mechanics

6. Levels

7. Audio

8. UI

e.t.c

A GDD (Games Design Document) in an ongoing and cooperative bible about design, it is a large and longer version of a pitch document, but more detailed and highly descriptive, it is meant more for designers, or programmers and artists who are working on the project the GDD is about.  This method has slowly gone out of date due to various reasons such as it being out dated before you start working on it, or that it's too rigid.

All the info and research needs a class to display them in, for example:

1. Moodboards: Characters, and environments

2. Level Design: Paths, Objectives, Events, Layouts
3. Mockups: Mechanics, Visuals, Camera, Movement,
4. Storyboards & Animatics: Action, Narrative, Cutscenes, Progression of story
5. Colour Scripts: Thumbnails, Schemes, Tone and Mood

e.t.c

There are a number of ways in which you can make a pitch document stand out, one tip I learned that would be useful in making my PD is using less text, if I just put text up on the slides instead of using pics and describing them, my audience will lose interest in me as they are trying to read the text.  I'm going to try and use a few ideas that where shown in the lecture to help get better results, such as setting it landscape instead of portrait to get the full effect of the screen.  Another idea would be helping it get a sense of realism, like if I managed to get my prototype on Steam or something like that.

Plan:

from here on I have set an idea of how I will complete this project, and that will help me to see what I have left to complete:

I plan to start and do all my mechanics before creating my environments, but at the same time having a good idea of what the level build may look like. Once the mechanics are finished, I'll do some quick sketches to get an idea of what I want my level design to look like, then create that using the assets in Unreal Engine 4.  In week 4, I have to pitch a document on what I have completed, this will give me a chance to get feedback and figure out what I could do to make the game better.

One everything is complete, I make my Pitch document and rehearse what I plan to say when pitching it to the tutors.