Postmortem
Intro
Now that the game has been submitted and completed, I can now reflect on the whole process that led to the end product. This will help for when creating games in the future, as we take this attempt as a learning exercise due to this is the first time we have worked as a team.
Initial Ideas
The first thing we did as a group for this assignment was to sit down and brainstorm ideas. Everyone was throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what stuck. I think we got some pretty good ideas down, but there was one that stuck out more to us than any other. This was obviously the dog prototype, which we ended up choosing in the end. Once we had a page or two, we started to discuss the roles we would have as a team. This process was also fairly simple because we all had different skill sets for games. Caitlin is very good at art, Ryan is very good at coding, Andrada is good with gathering assets and audio, and I enjoy level design and UI / UX design. This meant that there was pretty much no conflict on people fighting over what they wanted to do, which was incredibly useful. Next time I need to brainstorm ideas with a group, I also want to take some time to set up a Trello board to help visually track the project as a group. For this project, all we used was Discord to track the project, but it wasn’t used too much. I think the project could have used a better way to communicate as a team, so everyone knows what state the project is in.
Pitch
When creating the pitch for the game, Andrada suggested that we use a site called ‘Prezi’ which none of us had used before, but it was very simple to navigate and use. This site allowed us to create a nice-looking presentation. We discussed beforehand what we would be talking about, and so even though there were some nerves leading up to the presentation, we all knew what we were doing, and I think we delivered it in a good way. I do think that the videos demonstrating gameplay could have been much shorter, as they did drag on quite a bit, so next time I’ll make sure that everything is clean and concise.
Creating the game
When creating the game, we started to run into hurdles that would slow down the development of the game. We had weekly meetings in the labs to report and show the work we have been doing; however, this had some issues. For some weeks, we didn’t have the whole team as Andrada would be in Romania seeing her family towards the end of development. Communication could have been much better in our project, as most of it came down to a simple “have you done this yet” message instead of updates and deadlines. To help remedy this next time, I will make a point of using resources to track the development. A tool such as Trello or HacknPlan would have helped us in a much better way. When it came to working as a team, Caitlin and I would message each other regularly and discuss different ideas for how the logos for icons should look. This is because her design needs to compliment the UI I was doing, and I think that turned out very well as a result. However, working as a team also could have been much better, for example, when I was creating the level design and sent it off to Andrada I talked about collaborating and making sure it fit the level I had designed. In the end this didn’t happen, and the final level strayed quite a bit from my design, which I didn’t find out about until a week or so before the deadline. I wasn’t updated or made aware of the changes made, and I think the communication for this could be better for the next project. This could also be resolved by me focusing on doing the level, from the basic blockout and design, and filling it in with my own assets. This would mean I know for a fact that the level in the final game will be how I designed it and intended it to be.
I also believe that Discord calls for collaboration would be useful so that we can see visually how the game is getting along. Ryan, who was in charge of coding the game, was brilliant at sharing updates on how the game was going initially. However, that didn’t last for long as towards the end, we didn’t get any updates on how the gameplay was going. Any form of video or gameplay on call would help the whole team understand how the game was going, so in the future I will push for more calls and visuals for how the game is going.
I think that for next time, we need to be stricter with timings for getting things done, which will be assisted by Trello or HacknPlan. This is because there were many times during the game’s development where things would be delayed due to different reasons. For example, with my level design, I completed it a few days after I was meant to send it to Andrada because I was seeing family back home for Easter. With stricter deadlines and better time management, I would have started and worked faster on that aspect of the game and got it sent on time. I think that other members of the team could also benefit from this too.
During the game’s development, we would be approached so that the game could be checked up on and see how it is going. Unfortunately, we couldn’t show much because Ryan never brought in the game files to showcase the mechanics of the game. This meant that not only were the lecturers left in the dark about our game, but we didn’t see it either until just before the assignment. This could have been fixed by stricter milestones to each and the project management tools mentioned before. For future projects, I will push to have work to show, so that we can get some valuable feedback for the end game.
We had planned to all play test the game too, and have my girlfriend and Caitlin’s boyfriend also test it and give feedback. In the end, that didn’t end up happening because Ryan had to crunch and pull an all-nighter to finish off the work. In the future, I think this could also be resolved through better team time management and software to help us. This would mean it would get finished before the deadline, and we could test it, get feedback and improve the game as a whole like we wanted to. In other group projects, I am going to push for time for play testing because It is very important that we get feedback on our work and improve it as a whole.
Once the game was finished, and we saw what the gameplay was like, it didn’t resemble the initial plan we had for the game and instead was a goofy sandbox game very similar to Goat Simulator (2014). I don’t think this made the end result bad, but I think it would be better if we stuck to our plan more throughout development. It was very confusing to me on what the gameplay was going to be like when Ryan decided to program the game to be like a sandbox game. If I knew that was how the game would have turned out, I would have altered my level design in a way that would fit that style of game better.
Conclusion
As a whole, I think this group project has helped in understanding what will work for creating projects in the future. I think a big downfall of our project was that we didn’t have a good way to track the progress of the game. This project taught me how important it is to use resources such as Trello, so I will be pushing to use that as a group in future projects. Another downfall we had was communication and teamwork. Our team could benefit from having regular calls to collaborate when needed. For example, when the level I created was sent off to Andrada, we could have collaborated on call to make sure that we could improve the level together instead of changing aspects of it without any warning or reason. The communication on how gameplay was going would have also been very helpful and improved with calls, as we could give feedback and all contribute as a team instead of one person taking the project into their own hands. This project also taught me that we need to try to finish the game before the deadline, so we have time for game testing and improvements from the feedback we get. I think for this project feedback would have helped us a lot, so time management will be a massive priority next project.
I don’t think this project turned out badly, we were able to finish our parts of the game, but we should have had more communication and teamwork. We should have been kept on track and organized the project better, which would have led to a more polished and cleaner final game.