During this project I have created a demake of Team Fortress 2 which is a 3D hero based shooter however my demake was a 2D top down recreation of the Mann vs Machine game mode which is a wave survival player versus enemy experience, the aim of my demake was to successfully recreate the core gameplay and identity that is present in the original game. The platform I chose for my demake was the Game Boy Advanced due to the limitations of that hardware not being too restrictive of what I would be able to do for my game. The audience of my demake was both fans of the Game Boy Advanced and fans of Team Fortress 2 which my main audience being the overlap in those audiences that I discovered in my research, I wanted to try to appeal to my audience via being faithful to the original game and platform of my demake however I would say that my final product ended up appealing more to a fan of Team Fortress rather than the GBA due to focusing on recreating a Team Fortress experience rather than a GBA experience.
One of the strengths of my game was the mechanics as I managed to recreate all of the core mechanics that I needed for an authentic experience similar to that of the original game, some mechanics were not as fleshed out as they are in original game such as my upgrade system since it would have been way too time consuming to create a full upgrade system hence why I only included a few select upgrades that present in the original game. Despite the vast amount of mechanics present in my demake I believe that I fleshed out each mechanic to a good level, I also managed to fix most of the bugs that popped up with my mechanics over the course of the project which was very important since bugs would greatly dampened the player experience. The feedback I got from players also reflected this as I had a good amount of players say they liked the mechanics that I chose to implement and that the gameplay was similar to the original experience which was something that I wanted to get right so I am happy that I have.
Another strength was the graphics as I am very happy with how I managed to recreate the appearance of the designs present in the original game by staying as true as possible to their original designs while also sticking to the limitations of my chosen platform, I am very happy with how they turned out as my graphics were quite consistent which allowed my game to have a defined style and typically I struggle with applying graphics to my games since art is not my strong point however I managed to do pretty well this time as I spent a lot of time making sure that players who have played Team Fortress would recognize things but also that players who haven’t could also get a good idea of what something is from its design. The feedback I received from players similarly spoke of how my graphics were a strong point as they looked good and were recognizable as both GBA and Team Fortress 2 which was good to hear since that was my main two goals with my graphics.
I would also consider my level design to be a strength despite it not being mentioned during my player feedback since I feel that I managed to transform the level into a top down 2D environment pretty well since I stayed as true as possible to the original design with only two main area’s being changed from their original form which were the middle and outer buildings since having raised terrain wouldn’t work in 2D and a few of the collectable positions were also slightly altered to better fit with my layout but overall its still recognizable as the layout present in Coal Town, due to keeping the layout almost the same it also means that the gameplay of the level plays similarly to the original level which further helped me to recreate the experience present in the original game.
While not mentioned by anyone in my player feedback I would consider one of the weaknesses of my game was the sound design as while it was faithful to Team Fortress 2 and all of the sounds that I needed were present plus I also even included multiple sounds for sounds that are heard a lot by players to stop it from getting repetitive, despite all that I feel it is still a weakness for a single large reason which is that I was unable to make my sounds fit into the requirements of my chosen platform due to time restraints. With my audio not fitting with my chosen platform I believe while it doesn’t lower the overall quality of the product it takes away from the demake experience of my game that was one of my main goals, this also makes my demake less appealing to the GBA part of my target audience due to it not being a fully faithful recreation of the Team Fortress 2. In order to improve this area of my game I would give myself more time for my sound design so that I could compress/edit my audio using an audio editing program such as Audacity so that it sounded more like that of the GBA’s audio quality.
I would also consider animations to be a weakness since I only had a single animation present in my game since they were something that I didn’t really need many of since most things that were shown via animations were also communicated to the player via sounds such as reloading so I ended up cutting every animation that I deemed not necessary which left me with only my running animation for scout as he was the only class who’s legs you could see, I did this so I could spend more time on my sound since I needed a lot of sound effects. This was something not mention that much during my player feedback which surprised me as while I did cut what I though were not required animations I still expected some players to ask about why there wasn’t a reload animation or death animation but despite this I still view this area of my game as a weakness. While not having these animations present doesn’t really lower the quality of my demake it would have certainly boosted its quality had I been able to include them since it would have made my game look a lot more alive that it ended up being, In order to improve this area I once again would have given myself more time so that I could include more animations in my game even if it was just a few as it would still make a difference.
Another area that I would consider to be a weakness was the presentation of my itch page as while I am happy with how it turned out since my pages looks professional, has a consistent theme that fits with my game and has all the needed elements such as a background, banner, description and screenshots. I ended up using material from the original game for my background and banner since I was struggling to create professional looking ones myself plus I didn’t have as much time as I had hoped to be able to spend on my presentation, Creating my own banner and background would have helped give my itch page a more personal touch and I could have made something pretty unique had I given myself more time to do so which would have improved the overall quality of my itch pages presentation.
Overall I am very pleased with my performance this project as despite not having used construct 3 in quite some time due to my last two projects using unity instead I still retained my knowledge I had gained and still managed to once again build upon my knowledge, During this project I created something a lot more ambitious than my previous games and tried things that I hadn’t done before. For example during this project I made use of pathfinding for my enemies and despite how it didn’t work as well as I had hoped I have still learnt how to make use of this behaviour, another example would be how I have used variables a lot more in this project for a wide range of mechanics which has taught me a lot. I retained the many practices I had learnt during previous projects as well such as using folders to keep my hierarchy easy to navigate and using of groups to keep my event sheet easy to navigate. Another reason that I happy with how this project turned out as I achieved my main goals for what I wanted my game to be like and I managed to implement all but one of the features that I set out to do during my planning which allowed for my final product to be of a good quality. I did have some difficulties during this project such as the pathfinding of my enemies since this was my first time making use of this behaviour I did not fully understand how to use it at first however I overcame this issue by doing some experimentation with pathfinding and due to this I slowly began to better understand it until I got to the point at which I understood the behaviour to a good extent which allowed me to create my enemy movement that while it did have some problems that I couldn’t fix it still worked at a good level. Another difficulty I encountered was that due to the large features in my demake I encountered a lot of bugs during my production which I solved via doing constant play testing to find the bugs and then fixing them to the best of my ability and while I doubt that I got every single bug since at least one is bound to have slipped through, I believe that I fixed almost all the issues present in my game which results in a professional level of quality in my final product. The last big difficulty that I encountered this project was scheduling and motivation since while doing this project I was also doing project 11 which was a research focused project which caused me to get a bit burnt out in the area of research during this project however I stuck with it since research is a very important part of game making and I typically enjoy it anyway, as I was doing two projects at once it did mean that I had less time to spend on this project that usual which when combined with my the large scale of my project meant that I did find myself running out of time very quickly and to overcome this issue I decided to spend even more time outside of college on both projects plus near the end of this project I also decided to cut some corners on my graphics and primarily my sound in order to get them both implemented to a good level. If I were to do this project again I would try to include more animations since due to time constrains I only included a single animation in my demake and other animations such as dying animations would further increase the quality of my demake as a whole. In the future I will try to better scale my project since while trying new things during a project is something that is needed so that I can learn something new and push myself however I should better take into account the time I will be able to allocate to the project, I would also try to put more time into my itch pages presentation as that’s an area I feel that I need to focus on more during my projects.
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