This external project is concerned with with making characters and backgrounds for a game geared towards people with Prader Willi Syndrome. Prader Willi Syndrome (PWS) is a genetic disorder due to loss of function of specific genes. In childhood the person becomes constantly hungry which often leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes. In essence, sadly people who have PWS have the mentality that they are all ways hungry and for this reason QUB's Taster research project gears towards making a game that can hopefully distract the kids from there hunger for a little while and give them that release they need even if its for a couple of minutes. The game in question is a very simple game where a character goes around the screen and collects smaller characters with different colours, shapes, and faces. The aim of our involvement in the project at this stage is creating a variety of character and backgrounds that will help the team running the project find out exactly what characters/backgrounds the kids prefer and what they feel would be most motivating for them when playing the game. My Approach to the Project- Characters:When initially designing characters for the game, the guys at QUB gave us free range on what kind of characters we could create, however they did want us to have characters that were a range of different ages and genders, describing them as a 'family' group of characters. The reason for this is so that they can show the kids/players the character designs and choose which ones they would like to play as, allowing for the people at QUB can then record which ones were favored the most. The following is my approach to the project: Halloween Characters:Halloween Character Background Concept:Knight Characters:Knight Character Background Concept:Robot Characters:Robot Character Background Concept:Cactus Characters:Cactus Character Background:Planet Characters:Planet Character Background Concept:For my characters and likewise their backgrounds, I wanted to cover a wide range of themes that kids liked and had this constantly in mind when designing them. I ended up really enjoying and having a lot of fun during the process of designing these characters. My favorite characters and themes to work on have to be the Halloween and Cactus themes, since I think the characters turned out really well and they aren't particularly your usual run of the mill characters and I think that makes them stand out a bit more. Designing the backgrounds for the characters was also very interesting. I spent a while figuring out how the backgrounds for each of the themes would appear, since the way the game is its neither a top down game or a side scrolling game, being somewhat of a mix of the two. However once I got the angle I wanted I think the backgrounds help compliment the characters. Another thing to note is that I purposefully kept the background bare so that these wouldn't detract from the characters and so there would be enough space for them to run around in. I very much enjoyed this part and I got very good feed back from the team at QUB. They seemed to really like the work I have produced for them so far, which I am pleased about. Feedback from the Kids:After a couple of weeks we heard back from the team with their findings. They told us that the kids really responded well to myself and Francesca's characters, rating my Halloween themed characters and Francesca's dragon themed characters the highest. When giving me feedback I found out that out of all of my character concepts my knight themed characters were least liked. They surmised that the reason for this was that because they had armour and helmets on the kids couldn't see there face's and they made them less likable. I thought that this was quite interesting and is something that I never happened to think about when designing them. This was certainly useful information that I will keep in mind for my other character designs on this and any other kid orientated projects in the future. Next Steps and Thoughts on the Project so Far:The next steps of the project will involve me creating smaller collectible characters and taking the selected Halloween hero characters and drawing them from different angles (basically in the same format as the sprite sheet we were given). Another thing that I will be working on further will be re working my backgrounds so that they are repeatable, since its the way the game is designed. It has been suggested that I should also create more variants of these for different levels within the game. something I figure will be very easy to do.
Looking back on the project and my work within it, I feel as thought I have not put as much time into this one as much as I would have liked to. One of the major reasons for this I think is that with this semester being extremely busy, having multiple demanding external projects on the go as well as workshops I feel like I have had to focus a lot more on those rather than this. Another thing that should be mentioned as well is that the team at QUB is very laid back since they have not given us deadline for this project since they understand that we are very busy at this time of year. However I still want to and will be doing the work stated above in the next couple of weeks which I am excited to get started with. I again have really enjoyed this project and everyone involved has been very nice and have enjoyed the work I have produced for them so far which is a good feeling. Overall, I am looking forward to moving forward with this project and I am excited to see how the final game will turn in in the end.
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