Overall I think my project was a success. I managed to stick to the deadlines set by my client, however I was unable to stick to all of my own deadlines.
I allocated a set amount of days for each task in my project, however as I haven’t done a project like this before I knew that my estimates probably would not be very accurate, to compensate I tried to ensure that my project would be finished on my Gantt chart before the client wanted. Up until the “build the game” phase my predictions were very accurate, I finished all of my tasks on time.
I think my game is very good, everything works as it should and it meets the requirements of my client. I think my game is quite enjoyable and would look good on John smith’s website, I also think my knight graphics are very good.
Creating the knights for my project went well, to create the knights used Photoshop. I spent a lot of time creating this particular graphic. I am particularly happy about the look of my knight because I don’t feel that I am particularly good a graphics and this is an area that I struggle in. The main issue I had when creating my knight is that it had to be drawn from a top down perspective.
The graphics for my towers are quite good as well. In particular I like my cannon tower
The actual building of my game took me longer than I anticipated. In my Gantt chart I allocated creating the game and commenting the code 7 days. In hindsight I think this was a little ambitious, I haven’t created a game as complicated as this before and had very little knowledge of green foot. The “build the game” phase of my project took 12 days, 5 days longer than anticipated.
My designs were not particularly useful, the majority of my plans were wrong and did not resemble the finished product, this I because of my lack of experience, I thought that actors could inherit data values, they cannot, however they can inherit methods. In my instance diagram many of my actors were sub classes of other actors, I hoped that they would inherit data values, when I realised this was wrong I stopped using the majority of my sub classes. Similarly many of the methods I had planned to use for my actors were not used because they wouldn’t work.
Whilst creating my game I got into the habit of commenting out code that didn’t work properly as this would save me time if I needed that code in the future, however I ended up having large chunks of commented out code. This made my code very messy and at times hard to read and understand.
I wanted sound in my game, however I failed to realise that greenfoot is not capable of playing mp3 files. When I collected my sounds it collected mp3’s, when I realised that I could not use these sounds the build phase was already overrunning so I did not have time to get any different sound.
I am not happy with my horse graphic. I think it looks really bad and lowers the overall quality of my game. I should have given myself more time to create the graphics so I could have improved the graphics that I was not happy with.
My bow tower fires arrows, the problem is that these arrows don’t always looks like they are facing the enemy. This is due the rotation, however I lacked the expertise and time to make the rotation work correctly and I was forced to leave it. Also my arrows are black, the colour as my background. In hindsight I should have used a different colour. If I had more time to create the game I might have had time to rectify these issues. I could have had more time I had finished the preparation earlier.
During my project I made a number of key decisions
I decided to have a plain black background, this was an artistic decision as it contrasts with the white path and allows the player to add colour to the world with the towers. The black background also made things easy to see, a background with a pattern may have made towers placed by the player hard to see especially if they had poor eyesight.
I had planned to have sound in my game, however due to limitations in greenfoot the sounds I had wouldn’t work, as I was already behind schedule I decided not to add sound as it would add further delays to the project.
To help me complete my project I used Microsoft project. This piece of software allowed me to plan all the tasks of my project, and set deadlines for each task. Once the task was completed I was able to put a tick next to it. I was able to track my progress with each task, and see what percentage of the task I had completed. This gave me a visual way to see where I was in my project, what needed to be done and what I still had to do.
Both the testing and user guide took less time than I originally planned. They took just 1 day each.
All of my tasks were part of larger project phases. These project phases were
• Identify problems with the existing system
• Analyse the new systems requirements
• Design the game
• Build the game
• Testing and documentation
• Review
I gave each phase a milestone, when I reached this milestone I new that I had completed that phase. For example my design phase had a milestone “check the preparation is complete”. This is something I did with the client that gave me a way to see that I could continue with the “build the game” phase. I think that my milestones where very good, as they gave me a way to know when to start the next phase of my project
Overall I think my project plan was inaccurate. The time allocated to the build and documentation phases was incorrect, however my time allocation for the “Identify problems with the existing system” “Analyse the new systems requirements” and “Design the game” phases were very accurate. One of the strengths of my plan was that I had planned for the build phase to be finished before the client wanted it. However a major weakness was that I lacked the experience to accurately plan how long tasks would take me, this stopped me being able to make full use of Microsoft project.
The methodology I chose to use for my project was the waterfall. I decided to follow this methodology as it gave me structured and predictable way to complete my project. I haven’t planned a project before and the waterfall methodology and it seemed like it would be the easiest methodology to follow for an inexperienced project manager. With the waterfall methodology each phased must be completed before the next phase can be completed, this stopped my project getting too complicated as my progress was very easy to track.
