Post Mortem
GOOD
Simple
When we were designing the game, we tried to keep the game
as simple as possible. The main reason being that we are students, we have
other homework to worry about, as well other matters. Also we got ridiculously
incompetent people on the game , so keeping the idea we wanted a simple game
made things much easier for us.
Realistic
Our team was much more realistic than it was last year,
mainly due. This year, we didn’t aim for a ridiculous high concept in our game,
such as having a man-bear-pig inside of it or something like that. Like we said
in our previous point, we are students and we have other stuff to worry about.
Finally we acknowledged our lack of experience in making games, so tried to
copy as much as possible. If we were unsure about how a death animation would
occur, we dissect how other games do it.
Game play
Our team recognized none of us were knowledgeable of
Shaders, so we focused on the one thing our game had, gameplay. We had much
play testing from outside sources, to make sure that the game was just the
right difficultly. From this we focused on a sense of progression though out
the game, where the player will get stronger as they play. As this occurs, the
player will face tougher enemies, giving them a sense of accomplishment.
New Found Motivated
Last year our team members were demotivated, but we found a new
way to motivate our team Look at video game industry examples, when your team
has failed to meet up with your expectations, your team should take a step back
and try to see what your team needs to really work on. An example of this is
team at Crystal Dynamics which made Lara Croft, when they stepped back from a
full price game to a $20 Downloadable game with Lara Croft: Guardian of Light
BAD
Dealing with incompetence
If anything, we never
noticed how incompetent our team mates were earlier, and when we found out how
bad they were, it was too late. If anything we should have tested them earlier,
before crunch time came to rely on them. One example is one of our team members made a
hard coded menu of 4k lines, and complained all the way. When we noticed his
code started giving us errors, he ditched the team, we should have forced him
correct his code earlier on.
Last minute
There was still a lot of last minute work done on the game,
even though I tried to stray away from it. We managed to stray away from it 1st
semester, with a focus on enemy AI, and gameplay for the last few days. However
with this semester, our assets weren’t finished till the end, and implemented
till last minute. Even worse, we went ahead with the idea we can upgrade our
SFML from version 1.6 to 2.0 within the last week, bad idea.
No enthusiasm
If anything no one was truly pushing the game to its full
potential. Sure fatigue, sleepness, and lack to team sprit did contribute, but
no one person truly pushed for a specific vision. For example The art style was
never really solidified, as no one really pushed for one style. Other design
aspects of the game weren’t touched on, such as boss battles, because there was
no style to be inspired from.
Hopefully next year we can learn from this experience and not make these mistakes
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