Design Exploration / Final Compilation
24/04/25 - 28/07/25 / Week 1 - Week 14
Iman binti Kamarudin / 0364014
Design Exploration / Bachelors of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Iman binti Kamarudin / 0364014
Design Exploration / Bachelors of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Final Compliation
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Sources:
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INSTRUCTIONS
Week 1
- Look for available jobs in your specialisation
- Look into your current portfolio. What type of works are there? What's
your interest/passion?
- Compare your portfolio with the industry expectations
- Choose to enhance or expand your skills
- It can be purely technical exploration
Requirements in job market:
UI/UX Design
- Strong understanding of web design, responsive design, and design
language system
- Knowledge of animation software such as Adobe After Effects,
Animate, or similar tools
- Designing UI elements and tools such as navigation menus, search
boxes, tabs, and widgets for our digital assets
- Possess solid art skill, creativity and color sensitivity
- Conduct user testing
Game Design
- Experience in shipping mobile game titles
- Create and operationalise HTML5 games
- Create technical design documentation
- Excellent knowledge of Unity/Cocos Creator Engine
- Experience with frontend scripting(JS or Typescript), textures,
animation, GUI styles, and user session management
- Proficient knowledge of code versioning tools. (such as Git, SVN and
Mercurial)
- Assist in the preparation and development of comprehensive Game
Design Documents (GDDs)
- Basic understanding of game audio design and its role in player
engagement
- Good understanding of game mechanics
- Unreal Engine Material Basic Knowledge
- Competency in Combat Design
Project Ideas:
- Web-based game like pet society in Facebook or games like Fireboy &
Watergirl
- Interactive visual novel
- Mobile app game
- Improving technical skills (coding Javascript, studying combat design,
level design, learning Cocos Creator or Unreal Engine etc)
- Interactive website design
- Participating in my own 'game jam'
Sources:
After consulting with Mr. Asrizal, I decided to go with creating an
interactive visual novel as it could help me develop my coding skills and
is also related to something I am interested in.
I'm also currently taking another module called "Design Portfolio" where I
have to showcase one of my projects at the design exhibition, this is when
I realised that I really didn't have any original projects to show that I
was satisfied with. Therefore, I decided to make this project the one I
could showcase (this did not end up happening).
Since my only other original project was for game development, called
"Ruins of Destiny", and I wanted something kind of like a game, I decided
to base this project off the story I wrote for it. I then wrote a script
for it to get a better idea of what scenes to draw and thumbnails!
Fig 1.1 - Script & Story Breakdown
When I started drawing, I realised that I probably should reduce my
workload in order to get a somewhat satisfactory product so I shortened
the script! I drew all the scenes on Procreate. Here's a really insane
timelapse video if you want to see (warning it goes by extremely fast).
Fig 1.2 - Art Timelapse
Of course with my luck, I fell sick. Which meant that I got a lot slower
and my motivation became non-existent (yay me). I tried my best to grind
out the leftover art I needed and just trying to convince myself that it
doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be done.
I also start coding the scenes that I've finished rendering. I really,
really wanted the slider interaction to work so I wanted to get that over
with first. It also looked bland so I decided to add some smoke particles.
I'm using
this tutorial
for creating the particles.
Fig 1.3 - Ship Particles & Slider
After I got to the third scene I realised just how obsolete this code was
so I decided to use a list! It basically allows me to just drag my scene
in, the object I want to animate (if any) and dialogue box! It allows the
animation to play and finish first before displaying the dialogue box, and
the user can left click once it pops up.
Fig 1.4 - Serialised List Code
Fig 1.5 - Inspector View of Scene Manager
The rest was just tedious work of adding the assets and animating and dragging them into the script inspector. I also wanted scenes where the next scene would activate once an animation ends so I added another script where once the animation reaches the end, it relays over to the scene manager and immediately moves to the next scene.
Fig 1.6 - Animation Event Relay Code
Now, there is a flaw in my code where an animation has to occur in order for the dialogue to show up. I tried fixing it but I just ended up using an empty circle and adding a very short animation to it because it was driving me crazy. I also wanted players to be able to click to move onto the next scene even when there is no dialogue but. I couldn't figure out how to make it work. Therefore, I took the cheap way out and just decided to add an invisible dialogue box so player could click.
Then, I made the menu on a different Unity scene and added a function to the button to activate the first scene and switch over to the next file.
Fig 1.7 - Menu & Start Button
Fig 1.8 - Loading Scene Code
Lastly, I added background music and a click sound effect. To make sure it didn't sound to repetitive, I scripted it so the pitch of the click would be randomized between a range.
Fig 1.9 - Randomised Click Pitch
I asked two people to play it to see what an outsider's opinion was :) The
biggest issue for them was the scene sometimes glitchy but I honestly had
no idea why that only sometimes happened. The other issue was that there weren't clear directions on what to do, especially for the slider part. And with that, the project is
done!
FINAL
Fig 2.1 - Final Presentation Slides
FEEDBACK
Week 3
Specific Feedback - Look at webby awards for inspiration.
Interactive Website
1. What would the content of the website be?
2. If you want to highlight your skills, the content is not so important,
it could just be experimental
3. What do you want to showcase?
4. References for coding and aesthetics, what are the skills, can have
sub-categories for the references.
Week 4
Specific Feedback - Should think about the workload. Can start by
showing how the narrative is going to go in the form of a storyboard or
script and can roughly see how long and what scenes will be needed
Week 11
Specific Feedback - Art looks good, just be careful about the
quality of the rendering between different scenes
REFLECTION
I genuinely have no idea how people who participate in game jams do this.
What the heck. I don't even think the coding was the hardest part, it was
genuinely just the amount of drawing I had to do that broke me down
gradually. Aside from that, I definitely learned a lot and while the end
product may not be very satisfying, I think that I gained a lot of
experience in terms of coding which is what I wanted to accomplish! The
point where I decided to simplify the code so that it'd be easier to
switch from scene to scene was very daunting and I almost gave up in the
middle but I knew that I would be all the more grateful that I went
through with it in the end - and I am!
Aside from that, I learned that there are a lotttt. a lot. that can go
wrong with coding. I mean, I think I always knew but this project really
just drilled it into me that you need to be sure when you decide to add
another feature on top of everything else. I also used Ctrl + Z like a
million times throughout this project.
There are a lot of details that I am bothered by like the mouse icon
placement not being consistent but I decided to leave it alone so that I
could finish this game. Maybe one day I'll get back to it and satisfy my
perfectionism but considering how fast I managed to code this, I don't
think I did that bad! While I think the end product could be better, I did achieve my goal in increasing my technical skills and knowledge in Unity.
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