What worked well?

The escape room successfully meets the brief requirements featuring a timer and 3 puzzle designs. It also met my goal of environment engulfing the player as it cause the player to explore the level. It also works well together and shows the story in a show don’t tell way. This meets my design goal because of it meeting the requirements for this project.

The layout is recognisable to the modding kit using my own assets which was one area which got too little attention for the visuals. From a fan view this definitely looks like a pre-alpha but has protentional to go on.

The puzzles felt unique and felt like you was the Buzz lightyear in Andy’s bedroom. With the player being forced to explore Andy’s bedroom for the mechanics to be done in order causing a sense of order but at the same time exploration. RC added a sense of uniqueness this is because it was a puzzle designed around the game not a generic one that you’d find in any game. This met my idea of including a never seen before mechanic and something new to bring to the table.

A good thing about this project is that there was a lot of independent code allowing me to gain a greater experience and understand what I was doing. It helped with the fact that I had a little bit before the project started. I enjoyed doing it independent and only used a YouTube video when it was necessary and built up confidence using the software. This can reflect how my skills have grown and where I can improve for next time. This made the development process easier to an extent but due to throwing myself in the deep end with no clear plan on how I want the system to work it made me fall behind on my time.

This was a great learning experience for me because I found out a lot of areas where I struggled and where I need to improve on. I also got better with Unreal Engine compeered to last year. I would change the visual style in the future trying to make it look like the toy story from the movies rather than a “Roblox game” this was a major floor in my selling point of the game.

What didn’t work well?

I ran into a lot of issues when making this project for example I had many unreal engine projects this was because of issues like not importing the code from one that I made to another or the textures would just not load. There was so many mysteries within this project on way something wasn’t working but instead of tackling them I made a new project each time. In the industry game files are often spreaded out into little projects to lower the risks of leaks and paludism this is a huge part of their pipeline. For example 3D modellers won’t have access to the full game files as that has a high risk and therefore, they have to submit it separably for a few highly trusted people to put into one big project same can be said for coding sometimes teams are accepted if things relied on other things but mostly it is kept apart. But for a solo developer this problem occurred because it was scattered everywhere with poor organisation and it affected the workflow and time management.

In time management skills I think it was done poorly this is because we was set this unit at the beginning of the year. In doing so we have had to balance 5 other units and work experience therefore, this project kept getting delayed and delayed as first come first serve in doing this I poorly managed my time on this unit. With mistakes happening such as not importing things I wanted imported in other files this lead me to try and complete the game within a week as it was on the backlog for sometime. In the industry time is important and has to be well managed this gave me more experience in that part of the industry and that it is a area which I have to significantly improve on as a large majority of the project was done very late as I didn’t manage this unit time well.

I spent so long planning and coming up with idea. I completely forgot about the game and should have focused on that and meeting the requirements first. By the time this realisation it was already too late and I had to speed run making the entire gameplay system. I should have stuck to the modding kit and worked on fixing collisions and stuff as they are better looking. The reason why the planning took so long to settle on a idea was because of other units and coming with a idea that I would be proud off. This caused me to make the game on the fly so I worked every single day for almost three weeks straight trying to fix this mistake.

Overall

The player feel that the game is complete however, from the first instance of pressing play they could tell that it was a pre-alpha as there is a lot of refinement that needs doing they even compeered it to a ROBLOX game that you’d find. However, the player enjoyed exploring the enviourment and solving the puzzles. But the player confirmed that exploration and puzzle met the goal of the assignment.

Overall the project is fully functional and playable and can be shown as a Pre-Alpha due to not all mechanics are fully flushed out but enough to get a general idea. The final product felt playable establishing a complete pre-alpha. The game is suppose to create an experience that is both familiar and distinctive to Toy Story fans. The research helped significantly understanding what is a escape room, how they are made, their mechanics. Due to how I had to change a lot of the mechanics which I feel like effected the player experience for example adding VFX and shooting to Buzz to stronger enforce the feel of playing as Buzz. On the escape room a lot of mistakes were made due to over estimation others were bad decisions and some parts got way too much attention than the other causing a unfairness on the gamee.

What could I do differently next time?

I would start by trying to get the core idea planned weather I was happy with it or not before trying to make it look good and better. I would also not develop on the fly and dive head in first as that caused me to get overwhelmed then build upon the idea.