Ryan Cooke-Ward's Portfolio

As mentioned in a previous blog post, some time has been set aside for creating a story board that serves more as a concept reminder than a strict story board, however it does detail and annotate the introduction to the game, as well as give a brief look into player psychology and why certain concepts have been chosen. Whilst I could upload the whole storyboard, I could also keep some mystery going by only teasing you with a few select images as well! Project Management Expect to see a video blog entry detailing the blueprints I have been working on in order to create an inventory system! It's not entirely finished but it has a decent amount of functionality and had to be implemented before a crafting system could be put into place.

This definitely doesn't bode well for the future of this project, but whilst some parts have been successful and milestones have been met, creating long term milestones is actually pretty challenging.  As an example, just how long exactly should asset production take? How long does it realistically take for level design? Just how populated should the level be? What parts should I be prioritising?  As a game that will be based mainly around its mechanic, just how much can I get away with doing? Or, alternatively, not doing? It's fine creating an amazing in-depth world filled with NPCs each with their own personality, litter floating freely through the streets, but none of that is relevant to my proposed game at all. So to see so many production blogs honing in on level design and artistic elements has thrown my time perception off. I shouldn't need to spend more than a month creating all of these assets to a 4k professional quality. That's not what this game is ab...

From the start of this week, a lot of the blog will be updated based around certain milestones to try and keep the development cycle on track. The concepts have been completed along side of a design document and a lab report, so the next steps outside of research are whiteboxing. The previous posts have hinted at some of the whitebox modeling, and by the end of this week the aim is to have all of the whitebox levels completed, and production started on a trial for HUD's and UI's.  There will also be some further development on storyboarding for the scripted scenario, and a production list required for Audio, both foley and soundtrack design. The whitebox levels will serve as a starting point and a building block for architecture in the Unreal Engine, as well as being a good start to receiving feedback. As an example, if I asked a colleague and they would be unable to distinguish the castle interior to the tailoring emporium then it will be valuable feedback and easy to c...

News, everyone! Now that all of the boring paperwork is out of the way, it's finally time for Game Development to begin! This means that the blog will be significantly more active (Very sorry for the big delay between posts) To kick things off, the name of the proposed game has been settled as Adstus Fabrica: 21 days to save the guild! As such, the old placeholder name of You Must Construct Additional Assets has gone, but the domain for the blog remains the same. And then, a little bit of teaser art! From someone who is very bad at art, so please do excuse the crummy concept art, but it is worth mentioning it is still WIP and a whitebox teaser! Just to prove that stuff is finally happening! This Friday will be our first architecture lesson where I will start piecing the core mechanics of the game together before I start with any levels, but it's going to be great for sure!

As a part of our university course, we have been tasked on an employability report in order to research and explore the (hopefully) future career of our choice. This includes things like experience, skills, and where to look for these kinds of jobs. The very first task given was to choose a specialisation. To begin with, during this course, I was very interested in 3D modelling. Unfortunately, I don’t have a creative nor artistic bone in my body, and this became apparent when I was modelling for the sake of modelling without any kind of submission or guidelines. So I turned to the other side of the course, programming. We have been taught to use Blueprints as opposed to C++ or C#, something that I am very grateful for as it served as a beginners stepping stone into the wonderful world of coding. Being able to click, drag, and piece together blueprint nodes like a puzzle made learning very easy! And a part of the project I chose for submission also used the Unreal Motion Grap...

Quick blog post time! So basically uni is starting to swing into full work again, unfortunately I am not. Mixture between a flu and also just feeling rather unmotivated this year has meant I have fallen a little bit behind. Currently, there are a few upcoming interim deadlines, and whilst we do not have to submit anything for these, doing so only hurts our chances of passing the course. And it's almost all paperwork. So much paperwork. Lots of boring documents to fill out here 'n there, and not really a great deal of time for working on the blog. Or, rather, nothing interesting enough for a blog. Fortunately though, I do have something I can talk about! Games City Festival! It's been going on for several years now at Hockley, Nottingham, the creative arts district of the city. Last year I was a volunteer but because I live on the other side of derby, getting in was a pain, so this year I've instead gone sheerly as a visitor, and went to go see a few devs and games...

Today we were trying to cement the idea of our abstract, and I have a clearer idea of what exactly it is I am trying to create. It won't be long until we start working on the games design document, and I am eager to see how wrong I was! The Elevator Pitch We were encouraged to use an iterative method when we came up with our small pitch of our game, to write a first draft, critically analyse it and re-write it with these critiques in mind. Unfortunately, I have been toying with this idea long before the academic year started again, and I found it somewhat difficult to 'critique' and a lot of what I re-wrote was a rewording of the same idea, it didn't seem to build on ideas or cut much out. "The player has recently taken over as manager of the towns crafting guild which has for many years been used by adventurers and royalty alike. Using various crafting skills to progress the quality of the items they craft, the player must create a myriad of items fit for...