LOOKING BACK

Video of complete game:

Now that the demo is complete, looking back the development process wasnt completely smooth. To begin with I had a lot of problems trying to understand how unreal script worked. It took about three weeks to get my head around it seeing at this point this was the biggest code base I have had to work with thus far. This was a quit a challenge in itself. One major issue which I now realise set me back several times and might have even cost me quit abit of time was the fact that through out most of the development process I kept changing quit alot of things in my design document. Most of these changes were a result of realising that I might not be able to include everthing that I had originally planned to have in the given time frame. Some things had to be removed and as a result other things had to be included aswell. For instance originally I planned to have atleast five levels in the game. But I ended only including two of the five levels I originally plannned to have. In my original design I planned to enable the player to be able to switch between all five of the characters. Each of these characters would have distinct abilities, which would force the player to have to each one at certsin points in the game. But in the end I only ended up just having one AI partner(Timmy the dog) and the player could switch between the human character(Dick) and the dog on the fly. However the catch is There certain places the dog can go and only the human character is able to open doors and and interact(talk) with other NPC's in the game.

The other reason as to why I frequently deviated from my original every so often was due to the fact that once I managed to get my head around unreal script and unreal editor I realised that I could implement quit of things that would make my game look that much better quit easily. most these things were not in my original design, for instance in my final handin I included the ability for the player to issue orders to the AI partner without having to take control of him i.e. ordering the AI partner to stop, jump.

Although I did make quit alot of changes to my design I am very pleased with the changes that I made because in the end they made the game that much better than it would have been. Ofcourse the trade off was that I did lose quit abit of time make these cahnges every so often, time which I could have probably used in polishing up the game but most of these changes were to a certain degree neccessary. In future however as lesson learned from developing this game, it would be wise to carefully plan my design and stick to this design asmuch as possible. All in all I am very happy with how the game turned out, it turned out better than I expected and I enjoyed every moment of developing this game. For future development I would most certainly like to include the levels that were originally not included.