Fiz Presentation

Unit 3: Research Techniques for the Creative Media Industry

Assignment 3 -  Be able to Present Results of Research

Qualitative Research is when we use things like reviews or websites to help us in the design for a game. You would often look at these to see what your audience thinks of your games and how to improve on any game in the making.


Quantitative Research is all to do with figures and numerical statistics, it is a research style based around this premise. The most common figures that are included would be ratings and sales of the game, this is done both before and after the creation of a game. It is used before the game to gauge how well you think the game is going to do and is done after to see how well the game has actually done. The easiest way to do this would be by using surveys.

World of Warcraft.

Primary Data

Since World of Warcraft was originally released in 2004 there wasn't as much social media used to promote the game as there is these days. These days though there are many ways that World of Warcraft is advertised for example Twitter and Facebook. Interviews are also a way they can be promoted and in one with Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment he said, "We were all extremely pleased with the success of World of Warcraft on its first day of launch, once we saw the numbers for the first day, we knew that we had to immediately increase capacity to accommodate the huge numbers of players joining our game. We're glad so many people are enjoying World of Warcraft, and we are dedicated to supporting a fun and smooth game experience for everyone." This shows us how closely game companies monitor things like player figures as it can directly affect what they need to do.

Secondary data

The ratings that World of Warcraft received at released were very positive, the average score on metacritic was 93 and shares great scores across several rating sites. Within the first day, over 200,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts. By 5:00 p.m., over 100,000 were playing the game. These two number were record-breaking and made World of Warcraft the fastest-growing MMORPG in history. Within a single day, all of the original World of Warcraft servers were filled to capacity, and by the end of the weekend, more than 40 additional servers were deployed to meet the rapidly growing player base, as the number of new accounts and concurrent users continued to grow.

Borderlands 2

Primary Research

Borderlands designer Randy Pitchford, when asked about if the game would offend people he replied, "I'm talking about if a design feels outlandish. If somebody can look at something and go 'that's cool because it's wild and different', then there's value to it, and if it's not the obvious thing then that's why it's producing that result, and makes it more valuable because its rare, it's exceptional." The developers of Borderlands 2 held a social media campaign for the game on Behance, they released a new promotional image each day in the weeks running up to the games release.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/776864/Borderlands-2-Social-Media-Campaign

Secondary Research

The game was critically acclaimed by almost all sources, averaging a score of 90 on Metacritic and a 9/10 on IGN, with a lot of the sources praising the games sense of humour, world structure and RPG systems. The game has around 30 hours of gameplay and has quite a lot of replayability. The current price for Borderlands 2 is $19.99 however the price at release was roughly $40. The game was released on September 17th 2012 and currently has roughly  7,287,019 ± 76,845 owners according to Steam.

The Company I'd Like to Work For: Blizzard

The Company I'd Like to Work For: Blizzard

Blizzard serve as both developer and publisher for there games. Currently they have released six major titles, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch. The company was formed in 1991 under the name Silicon & Synapse, in 1993 they started producing they're own games with the Lost Vikings. The company has approximately 5,000 employees over 9 cities Irvine, Austin, Versailles, Cork, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, and Sydney.

World of Warcraft

WoW's highest player base was around 12 million worldwide and has currently dropped to about 5.5 million. Blizzard has currently released six expansions on top of the base game, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Catacylsm, Mist of Pandaria, Warlords of Dreanor, and Leigon. Each of the expansions cost around £35 at release and come with new races, quests and level boosts. 

Diablo

The first Diablo was created in 1997, follwing with Diablo II in 2000 and most recently Diablo III in 2012. With a lot of people being disappointed with the third installment Blizzard released the Reaper of Souls expansion the following year which boosted its popularity. Its a role playing dungeon hack and slash, which as of 2012 had sold over 24.8 million copies. In the first Diablo there were only three classes however since then they have released up to 5, the Witch Doctor, the Barbarian, the Wizard, the Monk, the Demon Hunter, and the Crusader.

Starcraft

Blizzard have released 2 Starcrafts so far, the first coming in 1998 and the second in 2010

Hearthstone

Heroes of the Storm

Overwatch 

Music and sound for Josh

Level 3 Game Design
Unit 73: Sound for Computer Games
Assignment 2 - Creating and Applying Sounds to a Specific Game

Planning

The genre of my game is Si-fi and so we want the music to fit with this. I want to try o create a sense of exploration as well as tension whilst leading u to the bosses in the game. There are several sounds I want for my game and to help remember which one is which I will name them appropriately, for example Ship_shoot. The files will be saved as a WAV file because it is lossless format this means you wont be losing any audio quality when reproducing the recording. These days a lot of home audio interfaces offer up to 192kHz meaning you can get a high recording rate.

Creation of my Sounds

We first recorded the sounds that we needed with a zoom H1 recorder and used an audio log sheet to keep track of what we had recorded at certain times. I then imported the sounds we had recorded onto Audacity, where I edited them into what I need for example when making a laser sound for my ship shooting I had the sound of a twang against a lamppost, I then used to phaser effect to increase the stats, the most important one to increase was the feedback. The frequency was also important as it created a high pitch laser sound.

 The music I did for the game was to continue playing until the player died and so I looped it in Game Maker. For the music I used a site called ButtonBass.com and merged different tracks to create my music.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2yiX7oXISHleVhIWkZiLTQyQ21pVFNqampsYXJ3NjQxOEZn

Putting the Sound into my Game

After making the sound in Audacity you now have to put it into your game to do this you would simply right click the sound tab and click create sound.










                                                      
Then when the new window opens click the little file and add the sound that you want. You should them rename the sound so you don't lose track of it in Game Maker, you can also preview it to make sure you have the right one.

Evaluation

Overall I feel that the music and sound effects I created fit very nicely with my space invaders game. The high pitch of the music really encapsulates the Si-fi genre and adds to the feel of the game. The first piece of music was roughly 4 minutes long and was looped in game maker so it would last for the entire game. Originally I thought it might be a little too repetitive but it turns out that when you're playing the game you don't really notice the background noise. In the end I was happy with this piece. The second piece was for the title screen and was called intro_music, the idea was to has it similar to the music going into the actual game but not exactly the same. The only thing wrong with this tack is the fact that it wasn't quite in time, however I felt like this added to it even more and so I kept it this way. The next three are simply sound effects one for shooting, one for an explosion, and one for the clicking of certain buttons like the start and restart ones. The laser beam turned out really well, however the sound effect triggers every time you shoot and this is quite quick and so the noise can get a bit over bearing, due to this I had to turn in down in Audacity and re apply it to my game. I kept the sound effect for the ships being destroyed quite raw, this is because of how metallic it sounded and I wanted to give that feel the ships as well. The last sound effect was simply for the clicking of buttons and so I kept it quite simple but tried to make it as relative to the game as possible.

Link to video where the sounds have been used. https://youtu.be/wg-eMEtGgE0