This document summarizes Caleb Wilcox's development process for his final major production (FMP) of creating an animated video game. Over the course of 6 weeks, he completed pre-production documents including a pre-proposal, proposal, and research on game consoles, existing games, and game designers. He identified potential problems and experimented with level/character designs. In the final 2 weeks, he planned level locations, sound effects, and fonts for his production. Overall, Caleb broke his planning into stages and documents to thoroughly prepare before beginning the development of his animated video game FMP.

1. Development diaries
(theory)
Caleb Wilcox

2. Week 1 pre-proposal and proposal
• This week has seen me looking at the start of my PowerPoint/document (theory) work for my final FMP
production, which in this case is seen to be more towards the creation of a video game. In this particular
week I mainly looked at my pre-proposal and proposal documents. The first one of these two for me to
complete where seen more to be worked on was my pre-proposal, with this I was more looking at
explaining what I plan to aim my production work around/what I want to create for my production. In a
way it is sort of like the actual proposal but a brief draft/document of it that I needed to do before hand.
This didn’t take that long for me to complete and I found it easy enough to get it completed, with briefly
talking of what I was going to look at creating for my production work. Once I completed this I looked at
completing my actual proposal, this I found to be quiet easy to complete as It is something of which I have
done multiple times in the past. However with this being the proposal for my FMP production I thought
best to get it done as best that I could and I found myself to take my time with it, making sure to not be
sure to not go to in-depth with it. Once I had completed this at the end of the week I looked to moving
onto getting ready for starting my research work.

3. Week 2 research
• With this week I started looking at the research work of my final major production, with me needing to
widen my research work quite a lot due to it being for my FMP work I thought that it would be best to split
my research down into completing it within a space of two weeks instead of just 1. impartially I was more
looking at the background of the aspect that my production is going to be based around, more looking at
the background of games consoles. In the end I made the decision to a long with the idea of looking at the
popular games console ‘Nintendo’ and going in detail at looking into the background of the console and
the company in general. This I found to be beneficial as from looking at this I was able to get an idea of
what different consoles run animation games and it has also helped me to get an idea of what I might like
to base my production work around for it to be ran/played on. Personally I found this to be the quickest
and easiest process for me to work with out of the first part of my research and it only took around a day
for me to complete, which meant it only took up the first day of this week. The next stage for me with this
week and the first part of my research was looking at some already existing animation games for me this
was to get an idea of what I want my production to potentially turn out like again this is something that I
found beneficial to do. Along with this in the last few days of this week, I also looked at some game
production merchandise In the of-chance that I might look at creating some merchandise to go along with
my animation video game. Overall I believe that I have worked well this week with the first section of my
production research and I find myself ready to move on with the next stages of my research work.

4. Week 3 research
• This week sees the second week of my research work were I have looked at completing the second part of
my research document. At the start of this week I looked at having a look at some existing game
practitioners of video games/animation games/in the industry of which I am basing my production around.
This I found to be greatly beneficial for me because I was able to get an idea of what some people have
made as some animation games and in the hope that it will help to give me some inspiration of what I
could include in my production. The idea of me looking at some already existing game practitioners took
me a few days to get done, in the end I sort of looked at a game practitioner a day, in total this took up-
three days of this week so far. In the final few days of this week I looked at working on the target audience
of my production, which I found to be quick and easy to do as I already have/had an idea of what audience
basis I want to aim my production around. Once I had done this I looked at some production research, in
particular I more focused on looking at some Photoshop tutorial videos of some designs of which I could
include in my production, this didn’t take that much time up of my day, as personally it didn’t take that
long for me to find some techniques of which I found myself happy with. Once I had looked at this and
done a bit of research into them I looked at doing a summary of my research and bibliography before the
end of the day with it being the end of the week so that I am ready to move onto something knew for the
up-coming week.

5. Week 4 problem solving n production experiments
• This week saw me looking at the start of another one of my documents for my FMP production and that
document happened to be my ‘problem solving and production experiments’ document. With this being
quite a large document I decided to break it down into a course of 2 weeks simply so I had a good amount
of time to look at each section of the PowerPoint/document. This first week of looking at this document
saw me looking more at the problem solving side of things i.e. any potential problems that I might run into
whilst doing my production. This I have found to be quite an easy and quick process to get done, this is
mainly down to the reason that I have done multiply in the past with previous pieces of production so of
the top of my head I already knew of some ideas of which I could get down. These potential problems
where see more as practical problems that might go wrong in my production and theoretical problems, out
of these two different types of potential issues I found myself to work well with finding issues for both of
them, as again I have done this multiple times in the past. As well as doing the mind maps for these two
different types of issues i also looked at talking about each issue and how I would solve the matter. I found
this to be not something that I struggled with but something I thought to take a while to do and also to be
quite tedious, never the less I still managed to get it done. I found myself to get this done well in time for
the end of the week, meaning that I am ready to move onto the second part of this PowerPoint/document
for when I return next week.

6. Week 5 problem solving and production experiments
• This sees the second week of my work with this particular PowerPoint document ‘Problem solving and
production experiments’. This particularly saw more the idea of me looking at the ‘production
experiments’ side of the PowerPoint which is mainly down to the fact that I was looking at the first part of
this PowerPoint last week which was more based around ‘Problem solving’ (potential issues that might go
wrong with my production and looking at alternates for them issues). With my production experiments I
first went with the idea of looking at mocking up some ideas of what I want my production to look like on
each different part of my game/level. To be more specific I was looking more at the design/background
layout of what I want each level to look like, or if not then I have been looking at the design/experiments
of some aspects of some levels that I am hoping on including into my production. Once I had spent the first
few days looking at this, I turned my attention to sending a small amount of time on looking at some
potential character designs of which I would be looking at including into my production work but I didn’t
spend as much time on it as I did with looking at background designs as I didn’t think it too be that
necessary as I know I will have time to work on my character design during my production time. Overall I
believe that I have worked well this week looking at production experiments of what I plan for my
production to potentially turn out like. Along with this I am also happy that I have got this PowerPoint
finished in time for the end of the week which means that I am ready to look at moving onto the next and
final PowerPoint document before I can be starting my production work and that is ‘Planning and
Production’.

7. Week 6 Planning and production
• This is seen to be the first week of me working along with the final production document ‘Planning and
Production’. This document is in fact the last document of which I need to complete before I can look at
starting my actual FMP production work, in the end I made the decision to look at splitting this PowerPoint
down to completing it over the space of two weeks, I have made the decision to look at doing it tis way as
I feel this to be a big PowerPoint and one of which I don’t feel I would be able to complete in just 1 week
so I made the decision to break it down into a space of two weeks. With this week I have looked at the
first part of this PowerPoint of which first has seen my looking at various different locations of which I am
looking at potentially basing my levels around on my game, this I spent a good amount of time looking at
as I wanted to make sure that I am happy with where I am planning on basing the levels of my game
around. Once I had done this I looked at potential sound effects of which I am planning on potentially
including in my production (if I have the necessary spare time). This is also something of which I have
looked at spending some time on, as with it being something that would benefit my production a lot I
believe it to be something necessary to include. During the final day of this week with looking at this
PowerPoint document, I also spent a small amount of time at looking at fonts of which I might include in
my production but it is something of which I have not spent a lot of time doing as I have not seen it as a
necessary thing that I am going to include into my production work. With this being at the end of the week
I feel that I have got done as much as I can, leaving me ready to move onto the second part of this
PowerPoint document at the start of the up-coming week.

8. Week 7 Planning and production
• This has been the second week of me looking at this particular pre-production PowerPoint document, with
this being the second week of looking at this PowerPoint document I found myself looking at the second
part of this document. The first thing for me with the second part of this PowerPoint for me was more
looking at the idea of different color schemes of which I could be planning on using in my actual FMP
production work. This is something of which I found to be quite important for me as it is something of
which the most things in my production will be based around, with this I thought it best to spend quite a
lot of time looking at so that I was certainly happy with the different color schemes of which I have looked
at. After I had finished looking at different color schemes I turned my attention to some more character
design for my production, but not in the same way as I did with the previous PowerPoint document, no
with this one I ended up looking at it with more in-depth detail and looked at some more complex/better
designs. Along with this I also looked at some lay-out plans of what each different level of my game could
potentially look like, with some of the lay-out designs I used mid-way gameplay and before gameplay
examples as it gives two different impressions of what the different levels of my game could potentially
look like. Once I had done this I looked at creating a brief production schedule, of which I mainly took from
my Proposal to save me time from having to create another one again. After I had done that I took a small
amount of time to do a short evaluation for this document PowerPoint which lead to the end of my final
day of this week. With having now completed this I am ready to move onto starting my FMP production,
which is something that I will be starting at the start of the next up-coming week.

9. Evaluation
• This is the final week at looking at my Final Major Project and in this week to be specific I have now come
to the end of my production which has seen me working on my evaluation this week. This is something
which has seen me to start quite late, but that is mainly down to the idea with me having lost my
production work mid-way through my time of production which was completely down to me losing my
memory stick so as a result I then had to start my evaluation later then what I had hoped. Once I turned to
starting my evaluation the first stages of it for me to blast through was seen more as talking about my
proposal and pre-proposal and finally my research documents. This is something that I managed to get
done quickly and effectively in a good amount of time, I have done a lot of evaluations like this in the past
so as a result I found it quite easy to get the whole document done on a whole. The easiest parts of the
evaluation for me to get done was the first few slides where I was looking at the evaluation for my pre-
proposal and proposal documents. I found these to be the easiest to get done because with them being
small documents, well if not at least smaller documents then any of the others, there wasn’t that much I
could talk about with them in the end so I found them quick and easy to evaluate myself. To conclude I
believe that I have worked well with my evaluation, getting it done in the small amount of time that I had
to get it done due to me falling behind with production.