Written on 08/12/2022
Welcome! This is the fourth blog post for the game Foreign Body, so if you haven't already, go check out the others! This post will be covering the work that I have done in the past few weeks on this project and what's next for the project and myself now that Gold has been completed.
Elevator Pitch
Foreign Body is a single player, third person, turn-based strategy game where you play as a hostile bacteria invading a defensive immune system. As you move further into enemy territory, you must spawn bacteria, strategise and consume your way to victory!
Game Trailer
Ahmad was in charge of creating an amazing game trailer for the team and I in turn created the YouTube channel and set up everything online for it to be uploaded. Check it out here!
Developer Commentary
While Ahmad was in charge of creating the game trailer, I was in charge of putting together the Developer Commentary Video using clips and recordings from each team member. It was important that I ensure that everyone's audio was as close as possible to the same volume, this was difficult to do due to everyone using a wide variety of different microphones and in different environments. I also needed to ensure that clips had consistent sizes and transitions that were not jarring to the viewer. This was overall a really fun video to create for the team. The team was told to try and record a brief 20 seconds maximum of explanation on what they did for the project, and I think the entire team came pretty close to this making the video short and concise but still contain enough information for people to get a general gist of how each person was involved in the project.
Quick Catchup
The last few weeks have mainly consisted of many bug fixes and final implementation of assets and the like for beta. We have now finished implementing everything for the project as we know it and will no longer be working on the project as the same group of people. Potentially more levels and adjustments may be made to improve the game in future and add more levels however it is unclear at this stage if this will happen or not.
Rush Hours
These rush hours will clearly show you in a concise form what I did for each of the last few weeks. Scroll down to the Flynn slide for details, or feel free to check out the other amazing work that other team-members did as well!
Menus and Text Changes
When we were still in Beta, I went through each of the menus and ensured that all of the text in the entire game was changed to a new font style. I tried a few different fonts first but eventually settled on the one shown on the far right of the image below. I also added titles to all of the menus and cleaned up their design, so it was clearer what was and what wasn't a button. Additionally adding borders around menus helped to make the text pop better and become more readable for the user so I did that for all the menus as well.
Game Design Document
Here is the final and most up to date GDD. It should now include all the information on the game in a detailed and understandable way. Other team-members and I have ensured it is finished and up to date so check it out if you'd like an in depth look at our finished GDD!
Final Thoughts and Future Prospects
If you would like information on this project from the start until the end you can find it all on the Foreign Body project page on my portfolio. I may create more levels for the game and generally improve some aspects of it based on some industry feedback with the rest of the team however it is currently unclear to what extent this may happen if at all. For now, the project is considered "Finished". As for myself I am now open for job opportunities having finished my course with AIE, so if anyone out there is reading this and looking for keen as designers, please feel free to get in contact on my portfolio website!
If you have any criticisms, suggestions, advice or wish to get in touch, please Contact Me. Also, if you want to stay in the loop on future projects that I'm involved in please watch this space. Thank you for reading!