Blog 18 Evaluation

Overall myself and Scott are convinced that this design and prototype stage has been reasonably well for us. The project has come along nicely and we have both learned a lot of things and looked into a range of different areas that we hadn't before. Personally I delved into areas of C# that I hadn't before and implemented things for the first time across any programming language. I'll go through a few points that I feel are worse going through with regards to the progression and outcome of our project.

The first thing that came up was our limitations with the development platform. We could only realistically choose XNA C# for the project, but having done just the one project in it beforehand, we knew we would run into a lot of challenges which would be hard to gauge. Though overall I think we were able to move past most of these within reasonable time.

Our decision to go with a mini game style approach to the game instead of a single stand alone game based on an event of the Highland games had its ups and downs. It was good that it meant we could think about the design of more than just one game, and since we were in a group of two it meant we could have a good chunk more to write about and think about for our design document. We were able to come up with five ranging mini games for the Highland games theme that would engage different aspects of a player. The one real problem that came from deciding to do it with a mini game style, was that a key feature of collection of mini games is a menu system that allows the user to go between the different games, and in our case we wanted them to be able to look up the controls and high scores without having to be in the respective game to see it. I quickly learned that a lot of work needed to go into setting up a menu system properly and fully as to not cause any problems later on down the line. Effectively what this has meant is that a lot of time has been spent making a good deal of code that there isn't a lot to show for in the screen and video caps. I think there is actually more code in this prototype than there was in the previous project I made in C# but not as much happens when the project is run. It's not something worth getting to hung up on hopefully since it means the foundation is set to put the mini games on later on.

Something that has been a problem in previous projects is unreliable team members or poor communication, but since we have the benefit of living together, we didn't run into any of these prior problems in other groups and were able to work well together often. A smaller issue I would note on is our poor art skills for the graphics used in the game, but this is something I've mentioned in previous blogs and it would be something we come back to and improve later down the line.

In conclusion it has been a worthwhile project that we have both been able to take away something from and feel the output will reflect that. With a good framework laid down, this project has a positive future once we move it forward from this design stage.