Journal Entry #4

This week there was only one task to do. Revisit the game design and try to make it better. So I tried.

05.04.2021 - Improving one page game design - 4 hours

During the feedback lesson I took some notes on what to improve. First replace some colors with icons (it is much more readable and I had a tons of colors in my design). Then add some pathing + some info on player and platforms movement capabilities. And lasty some general info about player + camera size. Also one thing that I feared a little bit was mentioned, use multiple programs for the design. Well I would rather prefer one program where I could do it all but since Tiled doesn't let you draw lines Inkscape was needed (at this point I was glad that I knew how to do basic stuff in it). With clear plan on what to do I started. Everything went pretty smooth. And after some time the final result was born. Check it out here. At the end I think it is definitely better and easier to undestand than the old one. On the other hand I still feel quite insecure about the dimensions, jumping and movement. Also I'm not sure if the scale of the level is right. I think that these things would need to be polished in some playable version of the level. Which could be definitely build using this design. 

Final thoughts

Since this is the last entry for Project A I think this is the right place to put some thoughts on it. I will talk only about the one page game design because it was the main thing in this project. It was definitely fun. I learned lots of new things along the way and I really appreciate the individual feedback I got. This whole project showed me that you can make game design in a very intuitive and easy to understand way. But it is definitely hard to master. Because when I was done with second version of the design I thought that it is now complete, but during the feedback lesson I realized that it contains several flaws. It turned out that game design is same as everything else. It's "easy" to make one but it requires some experience and undestanding in order to make it as intuitive as possible. And also you need a good tools (programs) that will help you during the design and will express things the same way you are imagining them. One thing that I think is crucial during the designing is sharing. Because without the input of other people you can never know how good and intuitive the design is. And I think that for this feedback you don't need to go far, just show the design to some of your friends or relatives. If you are arguing that you are a soloist and you have everything in your mind so you don't have to make the design as detailed as possible. Ok. Sure. But the path from design to the final game may be long and you can easily forget something that you thought of at the beginning. It is good practice to have some notes and one page game design is just notes that uses pictures instead of text. :)

The end. Again. Long journal entry. Again. I swear I wanted to make it short this time. But writing short and brief text is problem for me in general so bear with me. Pretty please. :)