The student began their video game production rotation by completing case studies on existing games to learn about different elements of video games. They started creating their own pixel art game by making background images and characters. While most of the production went well, the student struggled with creating detailed pixel art backgrounds but was pleased with how the additional shades they added to one background improved the realism.

1. Production Reflection
Your Name

2. Process
• This week I started the video game rotation. I have completed three proformas. The first one was a case study on another
game, I chose to do mine on CoD Black Ops 3. I learned a lot just before this case study and while doing the case study
because before it we went through a PowerPoint with lots of terminology on it about aspects of video games which became
very beneficial when actually completing the case study task. In this case study I discussed the main game types, the audio,
the genre and what conventions of the genre it follows as well as some information about graphics. I think my strengths
while doing this case study were discussing all the things I was meant to in detail, this will be useful for my FMP and later
evaluation during this rotation as I need to maintain higher quality written work in order to get a Merit. Another part of this
was analysing some box art, this was a useful activity as it will have a good impact on when I do print for my FMP as I will
probably have to do detailed analysis on cover art during my print project. Also this week we began our research, this
started with looking at three existing products, and discussing elements of it such as the types of images used, the use of
sound and lighting, as well as the audience appeal. My strengths of this were discussing all the elements required in detail,
the weaknesses of it however was I did not talk enough about the audience appeal and didn't’t go into enough detail about
that, I will remember that that was an issue and make sure next time I have to talk about the audience. Overall I quite enjoy
doing the research process as I like the written areas of media as it is what I want to go into after the course, so it is good
practise for then.

3. Process
• Most of this week I was not in because of the snow, however, I did have time to do some production experiments, these were very
basic and was just me getting used to creating the animations On this I decided to simply just create a football animation of it going
from one place to another. Firstly I copied a football pixl art image from google and created my own. Then I went to the window
section and created a timeline, I set it to loop forever and the time in between frames to 0.1 seconds. On one frame I moved the ball
to the right and tweened it between 5 frames to show it moving. In this I did not make the baller look smaller as it travelled further
away, in my actual product I need to do that to add perspective. My second one was slightly more advanced. On this I decided to
simply just create a football animation of it going from one place to another. Firstly I copied a football pixl art image from google and
created my own. Then I went to the window section and created a timeline, I set it to loop forever and the time in between frames to
0.1 seconds. On one frame I moved the ball to the right and tweened it between 5 -10 frames to show it moving. This one was more
complex and had around 30 frames. I will use the arrows the same way I did in that with using three different arrows and changing
them within each frame. I will also tween between 5 frames for most of my animations but if it is a short one I will probably do 10 so
you can see the animation in effect clearly.

4. Process
• This week I started my production and created the background, characters and menu as well as the smaller
features like a football and power ball for my main home screen and the first level. This took quite a long time
as it was a fairly tedious process as the creation of the characters and the background came from trying to copy
images from google, the part I struggled with the most during this process was the level of detail required, as it
is all done in pixels lots of different colours had to be used, despite only being for small amounts so it would
look more realistic when zoomed out completely. However, I did not really struggle as much with the simple
features and adding them in as I used a combination of features from multiple games and added them into this
also I feel the style of the way I created it gave it a “retro” game theme which I liked. Overall, this shows that I
need to improve by using more varieties in the shades I used to make it look more real, however I should try
maintain the retro style of the game.

5. Process
• This week, I continued my production and ended up finishing it, I began by creating the first level background. I didn’t want the game
being the most typical football game so I gave it a desert type setting to highlight how it is supposed to be different, this was not as
difficult as I expected and I based it off an image from google, I quite liked this background I had created and looking back having
finished the production this, in my opinion was the best part of the work as it looked the most accurate to what it was supposed to
be and all the small details on it I felt were quite good compared to what I expected, as well as this the multiple shades I used for the
sand to make it look more detailed was something I was personally happy with. This is because in my improvements for last week,
adding extra shades to create more detail was something I said I need to do in order to improve the quality of my work, so having
seen myself implement this change and it having a positive outcome was something I was happy with. However something I
struggled with quite a lot this week was when I was creating my second level I wanted to create a slum/ rough street type
background, although actually designing this with pixels proved to be a lot more difficult than I initially anticipated. The element of
this I struggled with the most was creating a realistic perspective with the walls and where the bin which was the target was
supposed to be. I had quite a lot of attempts at trying to emulate similar designs that I had seen online although I wasn’t satisfied
enough with them and it took a lot of attempts as well as help from Dave for me to have a design I was happy with. Eventually I
finished the background and all the other features that were meant to go on it and I could start actually animating the project. To an
extent animating the project was fairly straight forward as most of the movement I wanted to create was pretty straight forward,
one thing that I found when animating that would be fairly frustrating was when I created a new layer and added something, for
example a power bar, and it would appear on all the previous frames, however I quickly learned to deal with it by clicking on one
frame, holding shift and clicking the eye button of the layer to hide it from all the frames where it was not needed. I also managed to
complete my work this week by adding all my sound. Finding the right sounds and music was very difficult and in some cases such as
the actual music for the game I was not really happy with but I knew it was necessary to add some so I did anyway. The reason I
didn’t like it was because it was very hard to find music which went well with my type of game, and also I couldn’t create any on
“Garageband” as I had never used it before and despite a demonstration from Dave I still couldn’t really get my head round it so I
had to settle for some copyright free music which I wasn’t entirely satisfied with. The other sound effects though were fairly good in
my opinion, although I didn’t create them myself like planned and downloaded them from YouTube. I liked the sound effect when a
life was lost and when the direction of the ball was chose as the noise matched well with the retro theme I had already completed.
As this is not what I have decided to do for my FMP there is not a great deal I can take from it in terms of the production side in order
to improve.

6. Process