Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Q4 Evaluation by Slidely Slideshow

Above is a slidely comprising of the majority of the websites, applications and resources I used throughout the year. Below, I have organised them into individual sections and discussed how each has aided me with each section of the coursework.

Browsing and Research

This group is comprised of Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Survey Monkey
This group was essential in the research and initial concept phase of the production. I used these to gather images, facts, research as well as access the web for downloads and posting my work on my blog. Survey Monkey was used as an online collection data collection, and I used it to collect data for the initial planning of the game as well as collecting audience feedback, after the main production and ancillary tasks had been created.

Creation

Mission Maker was the program I used to create my main task. It is a level creation software package created by Magical Projects.
Using Mission Maker was ideal as I had never created a 3D game before and it providing all of the tools necessary to quickly create a working level with similar features to that of a real game created by a development team. However, if I was to do the project again, I would not use Mission Maker, as the program itself is very buggy and unintuitive at points, which significantly slowed down production and overall lowered the quality of the game substantially.

Video and Editing

The following group is comprised of Sony Vegas, iMovie and Open Broadcaster Software. I used these in order to record and edit various small clips as well as create a playthrough of the production. I used iMovie on the iMacs in school and Sony Vegas whilst at home to edit clips. OBS was used in both as the recording application. Aside from iMovie, i had never used these applications before, and I found Sony Vegas particularly challenging to use, as it is used in Industry as a professional video editing tool. OBS was fairly simple to use, with very little having to be done to be able to record my screen. If I was to do the task again, I may choose to use only iMovie for editing.

The last, and largest group comprises of the applications and websites I used to present my work and various tasks. Photoshop, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint were used to create and present the ancillary tasks, the Box Art and Magazine piece. YouTube and Slideshare were used to host the videos and presentations I created respectively, and were then linked onto my blog, which was hosted on blogger itself.

Prezi was used to create the interactive, web based presentations and BeFunky to create the various collages used throughout the course.

These applications allowed me to summarise and condense the work I had done and submit it all into one place, on my blog, to be presented. I have learned to use a variety of techniques, such as the quite advanced photo editing techniques within Microsoft Word as well as the creation of videos including commentary. If I were to do the task again, I would likely use the same set of technologies again.