Survey

Good website that will let me create and view the responses to a survey easily: https://www.surveymonkey.com
If I am unable to receive enough results from sharing with friends and people on the internet the website offers the ability to pay for people to fill out the survey. Will be a good fall back if I need more results.
Update: I just found out that unless I upgrade to pro the maximum amount of questions on a survey is 10. Not the most helpful thing but I might be able to make do or if need be upgrade to pro for as long as I need the survey.

I have made a start on a few questions for the survey and played around with what question types are available. Some of the questions are perfect and should give me easy to read results, however there are a couple that I'm not sure about. One of the questions is a set of statements where the person filling out the survey would need to say whether they agree or disagree. The problem I have with this one, however is that the statements could be seen as biased. The survey-taker might be more inclined to agree with the statement if they are not sure of their position on the matter and this would have negative effects on the accuracy of the results. The website offers an option where a certain percentage of the page-viewers will receive on question, while the rest receive a different one. If I could use this in a 50/50 it would hopefully negate the effects of any potentially biased statements, however so far I seem to only be able to change the question itself using this, not the statements themselves.

Popularity

Longest running MMO: Ultima Online
Second: World of Warcraft.
Third: MapleStory
Fourth: Everquest 1 and 2

Longest running franchise: The Oregon Trail
2nd: Pong
3rd: Galaxian
4th: Pac-man
5th: Breakout
6th: Asteroids
​7th: Mario

Links
​http://massivelyop.com/2015/05/07/perfect-ten-ten-mmos-still-going-after-ten-years/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-running_video_game_franchises
​http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/11422943/Ten-years-of-YouTube-How-the-streaming-site-affects-the-business-of-video-games.html
​http://www.mmogames.com/gamearticles/20-old-mmorpgs-can-still-play/
http://www.mmorpg.com/columns/the-five-longest-running-mmos-1000004117/page/2
https://mmos.com/editorials/oldest-mmorpgs
https://web.archive.org/web/20080803184659/http://eu.blizzard.com/en/press/070306.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17062
​http://www.usgamer.net/articles/activision-stops-reporting-wow-subscriber-numbers-at-55-million
http://fortune.com/2016/01/27/esports-drive-digital-video-game-sales/
http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/ubisofts-assassins-creed-hiatus-is-a-300-million-dollar-investment-for-franchises-future
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/world-of-warcraft/248281/world-of-warcraft-why-its-still-going-strong-11-years-later
​http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/14/dear-world-of-warcraft-players-heres-why-you-should-stay-love-blizzard/

I finished a concept painting of the environment for my game idea. I started with the one building (the one with the black shop-front in the middle) and then duplicated it a few times in either direction with some spacing. What it proves is that if I were to do this with my 3D buildings then I could change the location of details such as the drainpipe or the shop fronts and play around with the colours of each building to make it look believable as a different building altogether. This would cut down on production time a lot and might even allow for certain parts of the buildings to be generated randomly.

I side thought I had while putting this together is that if I were to make the game playable from this side view instead of over the shoulder there would be a much better emphasis on the character animation as well as make it easier to generate new map pieces off-screen. This would help minimise the impact and might even help fix the problem of it not running well on mobile. I'll have to look into it further and find out if it would be possible to have the world move around the character instead of the other way around.

I haven't updated my blog in a few days now and wanted to put up a post of what I've been doing.
I have started some progress on concept sketches for the game, however it is not my strong suit and it's difficult not to get distracted by the other parts of the project that I have more interest in as I enjoy the 3D work far more. 
Because of this I have also created a test animation using an old model I downloaded to see how well I could make a run cycle and then whether I could get it to look good while holding a mug of tea. I will put a link to the different stages of creating the animation below. I encountered a lot of problems while creating this animation which led to it taking a lot longer than it should have to create. In the time I was using it Maya crashed many times and then after a few saves the models right arm and left leg became black as if it were missing a texture. This mixed with the body movements not being very noticeable from behind mean that this model isn't very good for what I wanted to show and I will likely not be using it  any more in the future. Thankfully I plan to create my own model for the actual game so I hopefully won't run into any of the same issues.

I've been doing some research for buildings that would work for my game. I found a few images of Victorian buildings that could be repeated with minor changes without the player noticing. This would allow me to randomise which buildings are chosen to make the setting look believable.
My plan for creating these buildings is to model the individual parts, such as the windows and shop signs so that I can piece together the buildings in Unreal using the different parts and create different buildings without having to create each building from scratch. I believe this is called Modular Building.

No major update today, I just wanted to store a few ideas I had about a them/story for my game up here so that I don't forget them.

Idea 1: Man wakes up, comes downstairs and starts making himself a cup of tea. While making it he notices the time and panics as he is late for work. He grabs his cup of tea and runs out the front door. This is where the game starts; with the player taking control of the man, avoiding obstacles so as not to spill his cup of tea.
Pros:

• Would make for a good, funny intro sequence.
• I could make some exaggerated running animations with the character holding his cup of tea that would be very fun to make.
• I would have a clear idea of map theme as it could be anywhere a man could both live and run to work. A city like London would be great reference for appearance.

Cons:

• The game will be an endless runner so the premise of trying to get to work on time might feel unrewarding when there is no way to achieve that goal.
• Doing the work in 3D will make the liquid animation for the tea a challenge. Not a huge con here as it would be good thing to learn, however.

Idea 2: The player controls a basketball player, collecting basketballs and avoiding both obstacles and other basketball players.
Pros:

• It would be a fun idea that hasn't, as far as I'm aware, been done as a theme for this type of game before.

Cons:

• I'm not sure how to fit a story to this idea in order to create the animated Intro that I would like to include.
• I would need to create multiple character models in order to vary the other players in appearance to both each other and the player. This would add a lot more work for only a minor gain.