HA12 Task 8 - Evaluation

Overall

I felt like this unit was very productive, I found it to be quite difficult in some areas but allowed me to express some creative flair for my work. From when I first started the unit many ideas have come and gone ranging from making the environment photorealistic to making different assets and a different playable area but I am very proud of how I tackled the unit and the work I have produced for it.

I wish I could have created better art for the models such as cell shading but due to my own skill constraints and time I chose to stick with simple and basic colours. The reason for me choosing to do a low poly environment is both to do with my own skills and the software, I first began to create a realistic tree in blender but the moulding and craft of it was taking too long so if I wished to include all the content I wanted it would have wasted a lot of time in my opinion. The software part was another huge proposition to use low poly because it allowed me to put more content into the Unity application without causing serious amounts of lag.

One problem I kept encountering though was lag from the particle effects and lighting I placed in game, due to it not just being a forest but fantasy I wanted to make sure I was creating assets for both aspects. However, the more fantasy I tried to make the game the more it would cause the software to lag so I had to tone it down in certain areas of the level. A positive from that though is that I can see how far I've pushed the software in certain areas.

After completing the assignment I decided to ask my cousin for feedback on the environment so to see where I went wrong and how he would make it more interesting. The first set of feedback was about the particle effects in the mushrooms, he believed they made the mushrooms feel quite "cheap" due to the speed they were and the size of them mixed with them being a single base colour. Another comment was on the trees, due to it being fantasy he found the trees could have done with different colours to make them more different and make the environment flair and stand out without using too many varying colours, another one was about the materials of some of the objects such as the sword he felt like it looked more stone like than metallic like.

If I ever got to recreate this environment I would definitely know my areas of improvement to focus on and try to make the environment more exciting to look at than reusing a lot of the same assets.