With the final week upon me, I’ve been working on completing any remaining tasks I have left. All I really have left on my to-do list is to create a main menu screen for the game, so that during the shows my game levels aren’t playing immediately. This shouldn’t take too long to complete, unless I’m missing something really important about how to make a main menu. Looking at my “Done” list (as well as Gitkraken), I can see that I’ve accomplished a lot over the past couple of months. However, I can’t help but feel saddened looking at my last list of things that I wish I could’ve implemented. It’s especially hard thinking about how the main feature I wanted from the game (the healing and changing of the game world) I wasn’t able to implement completely, and have instead had to opt for showing just one version of the levels.
Over the weekend I also edited together the trailer for my game. I had a lot of fun creating this (turns out I enjoy editing stuff together a lot) and I’m really pleased with the result. It was especially fun splitting the two forest music tracks together to play along with whatever is happening on screen and I think it all fits together really well.
YouTube Link: Guardians Trailer – YouTube
As I thought, creating a main menu would be harder than I thought it’d be. It works generally; you pause by clicking the escape key, and from there you can resume, or go to the main menu. However, after initially going back to the main menu, and then clicking play again, the player appears to go missing, which isn’t great. So for the actual show, I’ll still need to open and close the application again, unless I can figure out a solution between now and the next show.
I also wanted to include an object in the game which, when clicked, would show instructions for how to play, but this appears to also be beyond my skill level. In order to combat this, I plan on designing a laminated mat in the style of the stone monument in my game which people can refer to if they get stuck.
I’ve had a talk with Adam and he’s helped me to plan out some next steps as I prepare for our arcade events. Ross, one of our technicians, is still available to help next Wednesday, and so I want to try and get some help fixing some of the small issues I’ve found this week that I couldn’t fix myself. Adam’s also assured me that the game isn’t what matters so much as the skills that I’ve learned over the course of the past few months, of which I agreed (and have recorded). He says it’s important that I try to sell myself and those skills, so potential employers can get a good look of my character and skills, which I think will be a struggle for me personally, but I can create business cards and improve the look of my website to help in that regard.