XB1000 - Games Design Blog by Chris Lomax

  06 - UE4 Blockout Project 25/02/2021 - I was given this two week project on Thursday 11th February 2021 (with the deadline being today at 14:30). For the assignment we had to create a level design based on either a castle, a bridge or ruins. After a lot of thinking, I decided to go ahead with the castle. I thought a lot about what type of game I wanted this castle to fit into. I considered a list of different things such as: is it a Safe Zone? An Enemy Castle? A Puzzle game? A FPS? I decided to go ahead with an oblivion type game. However, the castle / location itself would be a safe zone (with no enemies in). Upon creating my castle, I did a lot of research on a variety of different games such as: Genshin Impact, Final Fantasy 14, World of Warcraft, Oblivion, Chivalry, and the map "Cobblestone" from the game Counter Strike. With the majority of the listed games above, I went to the cities safe zones to see what they contained and I saw a pattern that in those types of game...

 05 - Favourite Scene Project 11/02/2021 - I was given this two week project on Thursday 28th January 2021 (with the deadline being today at 14:30). The assignment for this project was to pick your favourite scene from any sort of media such as a film, a tv series, a dance, a song, etc... and then turn it into a level. I had a lot of fun during this project and with the mid-week feedback after presenting my progress so far, I was able to improve some minor flaws that were in my design. From this, I will no longer make that error as I am now aware of it which will help me as a level designer. I feel like getting feedback from other people helps anyone over all, as the person that is looking at your work may point something out that you may not notice, so this really helped me in making my design better. I picked a scene from the tv series "Akame Ga Kill" from episode 15 (timestamp 18:51 - 21:55). In my document I talked about why I chose this scene, a bit of background explain...

   04 - Board Game Project 13/12/2020 - I handed my individual work in on-time for this deadline. During the final week I spent the majority of the mine time uploading the official card designs I created and also figuring out how to put our card game onto Tabletopia in a user-friendly way. After I completed that, I typed up the rules formally and play tested the game a few times with friends and my team. The play tests helped out massively due to the feedback I was given and it helped me see visually what was wrong with the original game and to come up with new ideas to fix them. Below I will show screenshots of the game in action, along with the official card design and rule book. I found this project really refreshing and also challenging at the same time, as I had to learned how to use Tabletopia and create a board game based on a mainstream digital game. I've played a lot of the old mortal kombat games on arcades when I was younger. However, the one I played most was on Xb...

  04 - Board Game Project 08/12/2020 - As mentioned last week, me and my team picked out 12 characters to be in the official game and added the character "Master Chief" from the well known halo series. Here are the list of characters that made it into the game: Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Rain, Noob Saibot, Baraka, Skarlet, D'vorah, Geras, Johnny Cage, Raiden, Kitana & Master Chief. We also created an online excel spreadsheet so we could access and edit it when we please.  We decided to make the majority of the cards global cards instead of character specific. Finally, we want to use much larger / chunky numbers as we think it seems relevant to the game as if you hit someone with a 3 or a 4, it doesn't seem as effective. But if you hit someone with a damage of 350, it's more in your face and seems like a big hit which I think is really good for a fighting game. However, we have made all the numbers relevant with each other as each person has 1000 health points. Here i...

04 - Board Game Project 28/11/2020 - We have been given our final project for the year which is 3 weeks long. (Deadline is Friday 11th December 2020 at 09:00am). For this task we were put into small groups to create a board game related to a digital game and had to choose one of the following: Ghost of Tsushima, Stardew Valley, Mortal Kombat 11, Call of Duty, Amongus or Jak and Daxter. Our group decided to go ahead and create a card game based on Mortal Kombat 11. When going through the planning phase, we were inspired by the game Hearthstone and one of the member's on our team plays Yu-Gi-Oh too which helped out a lot. Before sketching anything out, we had a long discussion talking about the base mechanics of the game, to get a feel for it and to make sure everyone was on the same page and knew what type of game we were aiming to create.  So we decided to research of 30+ characters from the base game of Mortal Kombat 11. As there were 4 people in our group, we researched 8 charact...

  03 - SketchUp (Level Design) 22/11/2020 - I handed my work in on-time for this project with the deadline being Thursday 19th November 2020 at 14:30. I completed my level design for The Last Of Us: Left Behind along with a document analysing the designers decisions made when creating this level. Please see my final level design along with a small analyse regarding the designers decisions. https://youtu.be/MmDEhSl7oMY?t=6084 (from 1:41:24 to 1:56:51)

03 - SketchUp (Level Design) 14/11/2020 - After half-term we were given a new project which is two weeks long. (Deadline is  Thursday 19th November 2020 at 14:30). For this task we have to do a level design from either The Last Of Us or Uncharted. I have played neither of these games and went a head to do my level design on The Last Of Us Left Behind. I based my level design off the Youtube link below (timestamps included). https://youtu.be/MmDEhSl7oMY?t=6084 (from 1:41:24 to 1:56:51) Here are my sketches / drafts showing the development of my project. (See below) During next week, I will be adding further objects to the level with a few finer details and a small analysis of the level (going into detail talking about some of the choices I felt the designer made).