PDFs
Self Reflection
Playing a role in the creation of “Face the Bass” was exciting and challenging. Throughout the entire process, I was very happy and proud of how my group truly felt like a team. Through the leadership of Ryan Mckenzie along with Tiffany Ku, Pamela MacGregor, and Sheena Chan, we were able to create a fantastic proof-of-concept for an educational music game. I believe our skills have truly improved as we can call ourselves “game developers”.
The road through development and group assignments did not all go smoothly. There were many challenges that we faced individually and collectively. During the entire process, and especially in the beginning, we had to find a way to “mesh” as a group while meeting digitally. This was difficult for me as I find sitting down in-person to brainstorm and generate ideas significantly easier than working digitally. To further complicate our ability to work fluidly, we also had to incorporate us all being in different time zones which sometimes made it difficult to plan meetings. With these challenges in mind, we still were able to work together well to produce our proof-of-concept game.
I believe we did an excellent job working through Fullerton’s exercises. We met multiple times to collaborate and share our ideas. We worked effectively by each completing the questions that we picked as a group. To finalize our submission, we discussed our answers to each question as a group to come up with an answer that includes all viewpoints that each member raised.
While working through the Game Design document assignment, we again were able to collaborate effectively. We used the same formula of meeting to share ideas, work through the document individually while writing notes, and meeting again to collaborate on the final assignment. We decided early in the assignment that the Game Design Document would be a living document. This allowed us to relieve some pressure of having to think of our ideas and stick to them which also allowed us to be more creative as we thought of better ideas. I thought that the Game Design Document worked well and successfully fulfilled its purpose of being a guide to point us in the right direction as we worked to create our proof-of-concept.
We decided in our first meeting that we would use G-Develop to create our game as it seemed to have all the tools we were looking for in a beginner friendly layout. Ryan took the lead as the main coder of our game since G-Develop didn’t have a friendly way to allow collaboration. Ryan did try to export the project so we could try to add a few things in, however, upon opening the project all the objects were missing and blank. This was extremely frustrating as it put a lot of extra pressure on Ryan as the primary coder. In the future, I would try to find a different program that would possibly allow for easier collaboration with a “cloud save” option for the project.
In order to assist Ryan, our best option was to code the section of the game that we were responsible for in our own G-Develop file. After it was complete and our coding was correct, we uploaded the asset files to a Google Drive folder to share with Ryan. To share the code, we would take screenshots of our final code so that Ryan could copy it manually into the main game project. I think that this solution was our best option for collaboration, and I do not think that I would want to change anything regarding it. G-Develop itself was a great platform which I would recommend to other beginner game developers. It has clear menus and many tutorial videos found you YouTube. Overall, it is clearly a well-established game maker.
Looking back at our finished proof-of-concept, I think it is an excellent starting point for a game in the music education genre. There are many opportunities for new features to be added to our game, and with enough time, there are many that we had proposed in our Game Design document. Due to time constraints and the required time to edit the character models, we only have one male playable character. In the future, we would like to include multiple character options for players to pick from so they can play as a character that would best represent themselves.
Another improvement that we would make if we had the resources and time would be to create a more in-depth tutorial system. This tutorial system would allow players to have a better understanding of the musical notes themselves before they begin placing the notes on the lines. We felt like this would allow a more natural progression in learning and therefore players of all skill levels can jump in. With a proper tutorial system, our game could also conform to follow the BC Curriculum (and other provinces’ curriculums) and be used in classrooms around the country. There are not many fun and exciting games that can get students excited about learning music and our goal would be to have Face the Bass fill that gap.
My time using G-Develop and working with my group on this final project was positive. I was able to learn a new skill and explore a game development tool that I may now be able to share with the students I teach. I was lucky to have a great group who worked well together and were all on the same page. Overall, I am excited to share these new skills and experiences with my students and hope to inspire them to try using technology in new and exciting ways.
