Production Reflection for Video Game Project

1. Production Reflection
Connor Wiffen

2. Process
In Photoshop I used the pencil tool to create the pixel art in a canvas of 120 x 90
for all the assets and then up scaled them to the ratio of 1920 x 1260 so they
would not be blurry when transferred over. Specifically for the Cargo Door I
needed to separate the layers of the two doors and the background of space –
then for the animation I had to slowly move the doors apart as the background
was also moving. It was important to make sure they all fit the space theme of
the game. The two space ships for the game where created in a canvas with the
ratio of 180x90 so it could be created with pixels, I coloured the player’s ship
green to clearly show that it is the player and the enemy’s ship purple to contrast
with it, the same was done with the Status bars for each ship respectively.

3. Process
In Photoshop I’ve created the main segment of
gameplay for the game where two ships take part in
a battle – I think it is going well at the moment and
progress is coming along nicely but I have run into a
few problems along the way, like for example the
version I have at home is a more up to date one so
some of the files couldn’t be opened at college and
vice versa. As the work went on I slowly started to
implement all of the assets together so I could begin
animating it. I also began creating the background for
the opening sequence which didn’t take long to do as
it only required building upon the doors created
before with recreating the background from the
beginning without the detail to add assets like a
planet or black hole to the foreground to give the
illusion of a scene change each time the ship moved
to a different one.

4. Process
Music and Sound effects needed to be added to the finished animation so we used
Beepbox to create them, Initially I only went for creating music to be played over the main
menu and opening which would be slower and music for the battle sequence where the
music would be of a faster pace and much more energetic. However I also made multiple
sound effects for the game which included a sound for the doors opening, Ship engines,
Ship damage, an explosion and typing sound effect for the final sequence. I think the
sounds are appropriate for the game as I kept the concept in my head when I was
creating them. However I did run into a problem where the music was longer than the
animation which led to me needing to add extra content so it would line up nicely.

5. Process
After going onto creating music and sound effects for the
game I needed to continue with adding the ideas I had
Come up with as the production went on like fleshing out
the battle and adding a main menu to make it feel like
even more of an authentic Video Game. For fleshing out
the battle sequence I decided to animate the enemy ship
flashing from red to white to yellow before the screen
goes completely white and displays the Ship Destroyed
message to represent the completion of the battle. This
proved to be more difficult than I thought due to the last
few frames being skipped when rendering the animation
in the timeline – I managed to ground this by adding
static frames in between to make it stay there longer.
As for the Main Menu I decided on a simplistic design
inspired by that of a game I had researched known as
‘FTL’ which had large text detailing the game’s title while
the standard options you would find on a Main Menu like
‘New Game’ and ‘Load’ are present. The blue colour of
the currently selected option was made by changing the
fill colour back and fourth whenever I needed to per
frame, whilst the white represents the option being
pressed. I did attempt to make the background change to
give the illusion that the menu was flying through space
but that proved to cause problems with the scenes not
changing smoothly.

6. Process
Here is the final part of the production process in Adobe Premiere Pro where I put everything I had
made up to this point together to create the final product. This involved exporting each of the
animations for internet use at 720p and placing them into the software for further editing. I added a
‘Dissolve to black’ transition between the main menu and opening to represent a slight load time,
the next transition I added to the footage was the Checker Box transition which gave the game a
more classical look and emulated effects when a random Pokemon is encountered in the wild in the
early entries in the series. Ending the animation is another standard ‘Fade to black’ transition to
make the clip have a more conclusive ending. To finish it off I went through and edited in the
specific sound effects/music – this proved to be kind of troublesome as after I rendered the finished
project the audio was slightly out of sync which meant I had to go back in and rearrange the audio
clips but that was only a minor inconvenience which was dealt with quickly. I think the finished
product is as good as it was going to be with everything I had.