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my day at the Norwich games festival

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 ETHAN PECK- Norwich games fest day two 31/5/24 recently I took part in one of the days at the Norwich games festival with the purpose of showcasing our game to the general public and looking at the work others had done in the games space in the local area. I arrived at the festival at 9 shortly after the event started and I stayed all the way through until the event finished at 4 to help the group pack away the event had many things going on the day I was present such as talks and many other stalls showcasing their own games.    unfortunately on the day that I went our game wasn't functioning properly, however on the first day of the event a version of I was, we were showcasing the demo of the game, this demo consisted of all of the parts of the game that we had completed, this was the first room, the cafeteria and the electrical room, this gave the public a decent chunk of the game to try out and gave us a lot to talk about with the public. I was disappointed that the g...

post on trello

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 what is Trello?  Trello is a piece of software that primary goal is to assist in team management, it allows you to bring all of you team members into one space to allow for everyone to plan projects remotely without having every member of you team in one place or you can use it to organize better even when every member of the team is in the same place. you can use Trello to set key dates in your projects progression by using the calendar, this way every team member can see key dates and deadlines to keep the team on track when working towards these deadlines. you can use it to manage all of the team members ad manage their tasks for the project. the main use for Trello comes into effect when using the boards, board allow you to set different tasks for the team to complete, any member of the team can set a task and any member can mark it as completed, this allows the team to complete tasks independently as that team member can take on a set task and complete it on their own, t...

escape room project: late development

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  in this stage I was populating the rooms and finalizing the project, this is another key stage of the process. it is now too late to change any of the core elements of the level and I must go full steam ahead with the art to finalize the project. the corridors were key to get right personally as traditionally they are a key point of focus when building atmosphere in this specific genre of game, meant to give a sense of claustrophobia he corridors are tight and small, additionally I built more atmosphere by reducing the light level and removing some of the lights, this works within the themes of the game as the ship has been heavily damaged by the parasite escaping its containment thus having broken and dim lights works in this narrative. its also important when building an environment is to think about what it would practically need for something like this to function in the real world so as a result of this I added exposed wiring to the roof this so all of the electronic element...

escape room project: mid development

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this post covers the middle section of my development on the escape room, this section of the development process was arguably the most difficult as it saw me making all of the design decisions that carry over into the final stages of development, this was the stage of development in which I was populating the environment this meant that as soon as I populated the rooms with assets it made the overall design and layout of the level final, during this stage I made sure all designs were final and transitioned into the late stages of development. this is why this is the most important stage for me personally.   to start with we changed the lighting and the atmosphere of the environment making it darker in the interior spaces, this enhanced the thematic elements as this is a horror game it was important to establish the thematic elements so people understand the genre, in regards to the layout of the level and the detail, I made significant progress in these areas in this stage, I...

escape room project: early development

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project screenshots: mid production demo section    these screenshots are from the room in mid development as you can see this is under detailed as its primarily the bones of the starter room. this is the main structure of the room on which I will create custom assets and materials to add detail to the room, this will give the player a feeling that the environment is lived-in helping to increase the players immersion and desire to continue with the level. to get to this early stage first I had to grey box the initial room, grey boxing is key so you can make the changes to the bones of the environment before you make too much progress to make those changes at a later time. once I had grey boxed I then added the materials. the materials I chose align closely with the space theme of the game, I heavily leant into metallic materials to carry this industrial sci-fi theming through the environment design, there are other details that I implemented into this early stage of developmen...

final evaluation and SWOT

evaluation of the year: over the course of this year I have advanced my skills during the process of creating multiple projects, this has been a key year for my skills development especially as I've had more time than previous years to focus on the specifics that I want to develop, this has allowed me to make rapid progress in multiple areas such as 3D modelling, environment design, graphics, textures and decals, these being the skills I need for my future studies and hopefully a future career. we started the year working on some small projects, our first project of the year, the board game project was a good way ease back into working, on this project I was able to start experimenting with photoshop by creating all of the cards for the project and some of the other creative parts of the project. the first project of the year being a group project was good set up for the rest of the year as this helped develop communication skills and manage deadlines by allocating parts of the pro...

level design for my personal project

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level design examples and write up - Ethan peck          these are examples of the completed examples of the environment that I created for my personal project, the purpose of this project was to ease myself back into creating environment in unreal engine and it was also supposed to be a challenge to get me to try new things, some of the things that I tried were making displays using the in engine modelling tool and then putting graphics on the displays, this was something new that I tried and was successful at and as such this has carried over into the space horror project. I also experimented with adding atmospheric effects that really add some dimension to the environment, to also creates a better sense of immersion for the player that reflects the theme of the level.  working on this project has allowed me to learn new skills that will be transferrable to different projects in the future. for this project I also tried 3D modelling which I had previously...