Reflective dairy - personal project

1. Personal Project
Week 1 – Initial Plans
The mind map we started with helped me go over potential ideas and
decide which one would suit me the most. The three options I thought
of was a short film, a poster, or a pixel game. I didn’t have many
ideas for the poster, or the short film and I wanted to try something a
little different this time. I ended up choosing to do a pixel game
because I thought it would be fun to think up character designs,
gameplay, and backgrounds for it. I love to mess around with colour
palettes and I thought a pixel game would be perfect to try out.
Creating mood board let me research and find out more about pixel
games and design ideas. I found backgrounds, colours and characters
that could end up being like the finished result. This let me imagine
the type of game I could do and what it could look like. There’s
multiple examples out there that gave me inspiration and helped me
make my mood board.
Writing down the ideas I had for the story of the game initially was a
fun process. I researched a few pixel games to help me get started. I
came up with an idea which included a cat going on an adventure to
find some treats as my initial idea for this project. I wanted to have
some animals as the characters for this to make things more
interesting and a little bit different.

2. Week 2 – Research
Researching different pixel games and seeing the style of each of
them let me think about my own game and how I should design it.
They all have so many different colour palettes and characters, along
with interesting storylines that really bring them to life. I watched
playthroughs of different games and made a note of the how the
player would progress in the game and what their objective was. It
gave me ideas and inspiration for a story for my own pixel game.
The survey I made really helped me to gain feedback from others,
which was useful to help me choose between ideas by seeing what
the audience preferred. This would make my game appeal to more
people and see what type of game everyone would play the most. It
let me decide on colours and what sort of characters I could use,
along with the location my game would be set in.
The interviews I did with other people allowed me to gain
information from different people and find out which type of games
they liked the most. I asked them what game genre they preferred
and what season or area they liked the most. It was interesting to see
what other people were like in the games that they played. Having
this knowledge will let me put some of this feedback into my game.
Week 3 – Production Experiments
I was curious to experiment with different software and characters to
see what would work best for me. Although I was initially going to go
with an animal as the main character, I ended up making more

3. human-like characters so I could see what outfits I could come up
with. I tried creating 3 different characters with different styles to see
what looked better and what didn’t. I even tried making a creature
that wasn’t human so I could practice with colours and see what sort
of new species I could create in the process.
I also made a background that went with a more natural setting so I
could see what colours went well together. I used mostly light colours
and experimented with different shades of the same colour to make it
look more interesting. I really like the way it turned out and I might
make something similar in the final product.
While making backgrounds and colours was useful to experiment
with, I wanted to make a small animation of a simple character
walking uphill. This would help me to practice some pixel animation
before I started my main pixel game. Although it was a simple test, it
allowed me to see what would look better when animating with
pixels.
Colour palettes for my characters was something I was really happy
to try out. Some of these I used to create the characters from earlier.
It was a fun process to mix and match colours to see what went well
together.
Week 4 – Proposal
Here I wrote down all the information for my game which was all
kept in one place that I could access and reflect on at any time. This

4. had everything about my game listed on it, so I wouldn’t forget any
little details about my game.
Week 5 – Pre-production
I made a style sheet with simple fonts and colours to show what I
wanted to use for my game. I found some backgrounds that best
represented what I wanted to achieve and put everything on my style
sheet.
I looked at a selection of different games and made a note of the
colours that were used for backgrounds. I made backgrounds using a
few several examples for inspiration. One of the backgrounds I
created had more natural colours and the second one was more
vibrant and colourful. I preferred the second one I did because of the
more interesting environment.
I planned out each scene that would happen in my game so I would
know what to animate and how it looked on each slide. It would
make it a lot easier to look back on this when I start to animate the
entire thing.
Thinking about the different equipment I would use and some of the
issues I might face helped me to come up with solutions and have a
list of things I would use. I made sure I always brought what I needed
with me by referencing what I had put down.

5. Making sure I stayed on track by writing down everything I had to do
in that day helped me stay organised and get what I needed to do
done.
Week 6 – Production
I started my animation by drawing out all the colour palettes on one
layer. This would help me to keep track of each colour and go back to
it when I needed a certain colour.
I drew out all the platforms, coins, clouds etc on their own separate
layers so if I made a mistake, I could easily go back and fix. This way I
didn’t have to worry about messing up unless they had all been on
the same layer. Thanks to all my notes and plans I had made
beforehand, the production of my game went smoothly. Sometimes I
would accidently put something on the wrong layer but luckily that
didn’t happen too often, and it didn’t take long to fix it. I’m really
happy with the result even though I didn’t have many pixels to work
with.