Critical Evaluation

At this point I have very nearly completed my second year at Norwich University College of the Arts but I have only begun this project and hope to take it much further next year. This term I have assembled an online portfolio for myself, with a large section dedicated to the Sweet Land game concept, and a section for showreels including the one for this project of everything created so far this year. I feel that alongside this blog my online portfolio and the showreel are the main pieces I have worked towards for submission this term. In saying this, I do not believe that any of these are complete, I hope for them to display the work produced so far in an appropriate manner that compliments and strengthens the work.

My portfolio is very easy to add to and rearrange, and it was a very beneficial learning process to use iWeb. It is clean and uncluttered, as well as thematically in keeping with my other work. I chose to include work produced outside of college on my portfolio because it often affects my coursework as it develops and I experiment with techniques in my personal work. I am pleased with my portfolio and worked hard to chose what to put on there, including only pieces that are to the best of my abilities and improving on older pieces. I do feel that I have been able to create a professional and individual portfolio and that in doing so I have developed my professional skills greatly.

This blog has been an excellent scrapbook for the reference photographs I have continually taken this year, and purchasing a camera has been a great investment. It has also been a place to analyse my findings and I have enjoyed researching my project's themes and related artists, even so far as to influence my subject of research in Critical Studies to be concerned with age in games. I have really enjoyed looking at age in games and learnt a lot, I never expected to find myself so interested in this topic but I feel it is very important and holds some brilliant stories and experiences that have yet to be explored in any great detail by digital games as a medium. My blog also allowed me to receive comments of criticism and encouragement from just about anyone who wanted to get in contact, and I reviewed some of these in one of the posts. I found this interesting as I have never published an idea for a game in a public space before. The most influential feedback I received during this year was undoubtedly from Sharon, which I covered in great length in another post, but which really cemented some of my core concepts and engaged me in dramatic changes of other parts that had been weaker.

I am aware that I have strayed from my learning agreement criteria, originally I thought that I would be able to animate a section of the sweet land level to communicate the feel I wanted it to have. Unfortunately, after several attempts at using vector animation programs including Flash I found that I could not effectively achieve the right movement that the colour would have, and working frame by frame with vector proved even worse for this. I did however manage to utilise the way that Flash works to create parts for the showreel, which I then began to focus my efforts on. I did experiment in using Corel Painter's animation facilities but there were extremely lacking and not at all designed to make lengthy animations of any great complexity, as well as After Effects which I hope to use a lot more next year and will research over summer. I also hope to be introduced to other more suitable animation programmes next year being in the same building as the animation course.

The showreel turned into my focus as I found I could display pictures of the characters in a setting which captures the overall feel of the game whilst also being able to communicate some physical attributes of the colour as it drips through. The inclusion of the other parts of the game, the shots of the paper shop and the preliminary level designs, allows the showreel to contain each part equally and I am happy with this small insight into the game world which I believe it quite nicely achieves. The showreel predominantly scrolls, resembling the scrolling of the levels. I feel that the weakest part of my showreel is the imagery of the sweet land, and I did not spend enough time on this part. The images are too zoomed in and you lose a sense of the environment length and level aim of path construction. I would change this part if I had more time, and rework some of the level designs. I know to spend more time on this part next year, and I anticipate that it will need a lot of work.

The paper shop was laborious but extremely enjoyable to make, I think that building it has been an essential stage of the game world development and helped me maintain my vision of the shop being a miniature set or stage. Making the old man character in paper and photographing him to animate within the shop is definitely plausible, which is what I set out to discover in my learning agreement. I have found that I will need many more body parts, and the best way to know which parts is by making a storyboard. I have made a small animated experiment of these pieces in Flash which does work, but After Effects or Maya would be perhaps better. I will look into this in greater detail next year, as I still hope it will be the animation style for all of the real world scenes.

I have high hopes for next year and I have managed to maintained my enthusiasm for this project despite the technical and time-scale related challenges, but maybe more importantly I have managed to maintain the heart of the game concept and bring out of it some delightful moments.

Showreel

Today I finished putting together my showreel, based on the shelf design I was experimenting with in a previous post. I decided to painstakingly animate the drips in flash frame by frame and then put the rest together in iMovie...

I used music by Kevin MacLeod, you can see the full showreel on my portfolio site rosieball.com

Creative Commons and Kevin MacLeod

I already knew a bit about creative commons licenses from my experience with websites in the past, so I chose a license for my portfolio site and put it clearly on the front page. Related to this, I was trying to think of music sources for some accompanying music to my project showreel and remembered the talented and generous Kevin MacLeod of http://incompetech.com/ who writes small and long pieces that span almost all genres and moods, all free to use so long as he is credited.

I chose the tracks I used because piano seems appropriately timeless and sort of comical, but the clarinet is quite sombre. I was planing on using distressed music that sounded like a vinyl record being played or more upbeat music box type thing, but it all sounded a bit creepy or eerie when I tried it. I think the ones I chose fit quite nicely.

Edit: I emailed Kevin MacLeod to say thank you, and he replied really quickly with a nice message. Creative Commons is an excellent way for creative people to help each other out and share things without the fears of their work being misused.