At beginning of my last college year I was planning to make
a driving 2D/3D game for my Games Development course. I was thinking about
having to control a bike and ensure that the driver will stay on the bike or
the bike will stay on the road. I was planning to have a constant background in
my game and I if was going to use maps for my game, or just aim to win points. For
the creating of my game I had to use Unity for the programming of the game and
Blender to design my assets.
After researching about Unity, learning about the
fundamentals of making video games and watching different tutorial on YouTube;
I changed completely my game idea and decided to make a first person controller
shooting/survival game. The environment of my game will be a castle that I
designed with Blender. Within the game environment I have included some assets
that I have made on my own such as the gun, the door of the castle, the whole
castle but I have also used already made assets that are available for free at
the Unity asset store. My enemies look
like zombies and their aim is to chase the player and kill him. Also the player
has unlimited bullets.
During the production of the game, I have faced many
different difficulties with some of them still occurring. The majority of the errors were related with
the code. Fortunately, there are many unity forums on the web which helped me
solved the majority of the bugs. The only error which still occurs is with the
enemies which don’t work as I have planned and this is my only anxiety about my
game right now. Furthermore, another mistake that I faced but I solved
effectively was on how to turn my game into a first person controller.
Fortunately, I found some useful tutorials on YouTube that helped me solve this
issue. In general, the tutorial that I used the most is the survival tutorial
that is provided in Unity’s website and had analytical information and guidance
regarding different stages of the production of a video game.
Testing is a very important part for the development of a
video game. It helps developers identify problems within a video game and fix
them accordingly. By doing that they make sure that they reach the high
expectations of the high demanding customers; this works vice versa, if they
find bugs within a game they will create a negative reputation about it and
people will avoid playing it.
Phrases
There are different phrases during the testing process of a
video game.
The first stage is the Alpha testing when the game reaches a
playable state. The game is at a very
early version, therefore may not contain everything for the final version. The
changes that are usually made after this phrase are basic changes such as the
life of the characters or the design changes. Alpha testing is usually
performed only by members of the developing team.
The next stage after Alpha Testing is Beta testing. The
purpose of this stage is to crush news bugs that have appeared prior to the
commercial release of the game. This
phase is usually done externally but also internally. A very popular example of
a video game which announces Beta versions before it is published is Football
Manager. This helps the customers report the bugs or what they don’t like to
Sports Interactive and suggest any possible improvements. After that Sports
Interactive consider all the reports, makes the changes and announces a report
analysing what they have changes to the game. An example can be found below:
Please note that source for this announcement is: http://www.footballmanager.com/news/fm15-beta-update-1503-available
““As you may have
noticed, SI staff have been monitoring the bugs forum to make sure any issues
which are found are immediately looked into. Thanks to this, we've already been
able to locate and fix a few issues which were in the original release for a
small update.
As always this update
is save game compatible, you will not need to start a new save game for this to
work in your game. We are aware there are some issues which have not been fixed
which we are still looking into, the most notable of which is the crash which
sometimes occurs on the individual training screen. For the time-being we ask
users not to use that screen until we can give it the all-clear. Also there are
no match engine changes included in this build other than optimisation.
The list contains the
following fixes:
STABILITY &
PERFORMANCE
·Improved general performance
·Improved trackpad performance
·Fix for issues affecting 10.6.8 NVIDIA Macs
·Fix for crashes during processing and going into a match
·Fix for crash on quit
MATCH ENGINE
·Improvements to goalkeeping
·Improved goals from direct free kicks
·Fixed consistently, unrealistic high scorelines in lower leagues
·Fixed skin tone issues
·Fixed headed backpasses leading to goals
·Reduced own goal levels
·Hundreds of other changes to match AI
·Further polish to animations
TRANSFERS &
CONTRACTS
·Fixed issue where selling a player for a large fee would reduce the
users transfer budget
·Fixed issue where users could sometimes not offer a contract to a player
they had made an enquiry for
·Fixed issue in contract negotiations where including the ëOne year
extension after X league games would prevent the user from agreeing terms with
the player
·Fixed issue in contract negotiations where selecting Use Existing Terms
would prevent the user from removing some competition bonuses
INTERACTION
·Improved balance of the ease at which a player can be talked around when
they are unhappy
·Improved balance of the amount of teammates who support players in their
unhappiness
·Fixed issue where players would ask to leave for first team football
before they simply asked for more first team football
·'Request Tutoring’ option has been added to increase the amount of
tutoring options the user has
·Fixed the ability to offer continent-specific tournament football to
players not playing in that continent
·Fixed rare instances of promises to accept a bid for a player being
broken when no bid was made
·Balanced the regularity at which players will request new contracts
·Fixed board meetings being generated harshly and the ability to set
yourself multiple points targets from within a board meeting
COMPETITIONS
·Amended Champions Cup seedings for 2014/15 season
·Improved Liverpool Champions Cup Quarter Final scheduling
·Fixed drafts not being scheduled correctly
·All A-League matches are now on TV
·Fixed players not coming off DL6 at the end of their stint
·Fixed Re-entry Draft Two pick duplication
·Fixed issue where Young Designated Player contract logic was being
applied incorrectly at times preventing User offering a contract to a player
·Fixed issue where Free Agent retained Season Ending Injury status
meaning they couldn’t be registered
·Fixed NYCFC manager job becoming Insecure when they join MLS
·Toned down NYCFC trade activity before they join MLS
MEDIA & NEWS
·Fixed AI managers being incorrectly questioned and talking about the
user struggling
·Fixed Team of the Year player in incorrect position
·Fixed not enough nations available to manage
·Fixed subscription selections being reset on save/load
·Fixed results in League Cup counting towards club’s Highest Scoring
League Game record
·Fixed English Premier Division Top Goalscorer Record is Sheringham with
1 goal
·Fixed view Incident button on controversial penalty incident news item
doesn’t show the foul
·Fixed completely blank news item
MISC
·Adjusted Dutch wages in both Eredivise and Juplier League
·Fixed an issue where a player would retire immediately after signing as
a Player/Coach
·Fixed an issue where a player would retire without giving the correct
reason
·Adjusted coaches training workload
·Fixed an issue with transfer budgets after adjusted season expectations
mid-season
·Fixed the issue of a users profile changing unexpectedly
FMC
·Various skin fixes
·MLS now be playable in Challenges
If your game version
doesn't immediately update (the game has to be closed for it to update), please
try closing down Steam and re-launching it. The version number will now
be 15.0.3. “”
Gold testing is the phrase that last minute changes can be
made. The game is completely playable
and there should be no breaking bugs that can make the game unplayable. The game is like any other retail game and the
project team usually make some last changes that will make a significant impact
on player’s satisfaction.
Certification is the last phase of testing and is done by
the hardware manufacturers. Before the game take the certification it has to
meet some requirements that are set by Sony, Microsoft etc. or software
platform owners such as Steam. The application will be rejected if the game
does not meet certification as it happens for every game.
Conclusion
Testing ensures that
the game is released in a timely manner and operates at the standards expected.
A game having bugs cannot run therefore
and can dissatisfy customers therefore I believe that it is essential having a
game that runs properly and will meet the customers’ expectations.
This year I will make a shooting/survival game. In my video game my main character will be a character who would look like with a minion but it won't be the same. Unfortunately, I couldn't use minions because it would be against the law as it would be copyright. As a result I have decided to design a similar character with some of its characteristics but with many things differing considering that I have to comply with the law.
In the game the character will be under attack by enemies who will have the same design with him but different colours. The aim of my game will be the survival of the character. Furthermore, the character will be enhanced with a gun. I have already designed this gun and it is at the picture below.
Gun
The number of bullets for the player won’t be unlimited. There would be different assets within the game environment of the game that will give bullets to the player. The assets that I am thinking to use for this purpose are stars, mushrooms and bullets.
Health Bar
Additionally, I will use a health bar for the character and probably a score board which will depend on the number of the enemies you have killed. At my game the aim will be to last longer and earn the most points possible. You won't be able to win this game but only to earn points.
My target audience for this video game is people with interest in shooting and survival games. An interesting article which analyses the preferences of people in video games can be found in the link below. This concludes that the majority of males prefer violent games such as shooting games etc. As a result I need to expect to attract more males compared to females in my video game. I am not sure yet about the audio I will use in the game but I think this is the last thing I need to worry about. I prefer to finish the graphics and the code first, ensure that the game has no bugs and then add audio to my game. http://usabilitynews.org/video-games-males-prefer-violence-while-females-prefer-social/
During the production of the game, I have faced many
different difficulties with some of them still occurring. The majority of the errors were related with
the code. Fortunately, there are many unity forums on the web which helped me
solved the majority of the bugs. The only error which still occurs is with the
enemies which don’t work as I have planned and this is my only anxiety about my
game right now. Furthermore, another mistake that I faced but I solved
effectively was on how to turn my game into a first person controller.
Fortunately, I found some useful tutorials on YouTube that helped me solve this
issue. In general, the tutorial that I used the most is the survival tutorial
that is provided in Unity’s website and had analytical information and guidance
regarding different stages of the production of a video game.
