Blog 6

Reflection

Well this is it, the final blog.

During this course I have learned a lot of new things. When I started this course, I didn’t have any experience in actually making a game or any experience in working with unity at all. The later would come to greatly impact the way we would be working on the project. But that will come in a short while. For now I just want to say that while I did come in here with no knowledge about actually making a game, I have learned a lot and feel much richer now. So regarding what this blog will be about, I will try to break down the things that went well, and those that went less well. Not just throughout the entire project, but also for each individual step.

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Since most of us actually had not made a game before it was hard to estimate how long each feature we wanted would take and we ended up slightly over scoping the project. This lead to us having to cut a few animations and some minor mechanics. I also had some trouble with the shark’s movement animation as it was 40+ frames long due to me misunderstanding a detail on an assignment in our minor. Other things that went less than optimal was that my laptop crashed, and I had to send it in for repairs three times during the course. While I still could work on my back-up laptop and the more powerful laptop I borrowed from the University, this did disturb my workflow which slowed down my production process.

The things that went on the better side during this project was that we were good at communicating within our team. This helped us prioritize which work was more important and mostly prevented working on things that might not end up in the finalized game. I also belive that once the project was under way we had a fairly good sense of how much work we could schedule for one week without completely overworking ourselves, with one exception of our programmer going nuts one weekend.  We also had a good sense of how much we could accomplish towards the end. That allowed us to improve on a lot of things in the game even in the final days while still delivering a bug free product.

Alpha

 

For the Alpha we had a simple game that featured: A player avatar that can move and shoot. One enemy. One obstacle. One powerup.

The good parts were that all of these functioned as intended and fulfilled their basic purpose. We were also prepared as a group for the playtest and the presentation. On the worse side our powerup was not only lackluster but it didn’t visually communicate well enough what it was. We also had a bit of slow start with getting art assets into the game.

 

Beta

For the Beta we had a darkness layer that completely darkened out the screen far away from the boat as well as a flashlight to remove the darkness. Reworked power-ups and one more enemy as well as all of the assets from the alpha. Some assets were also a bit more polished at this point. Another noteworthy thing would be that we also had two levels to give a sense of progression.

What went well with the Beta was that we managed to deliver everything that we wanted in the beta on time and everything was working well. We also had our artifacts a bit more polished despite that not being requirement. What went worse was that the teams transition to use GitKraken was not very smooth and some of our members didn’t have access to it until after the Beta period. My lack of experience in unity also led to our programmer still having to implement most of the art assets.

 

Final

So the final build of the game had: 1 player avatar, 2 enemies, 2 different sizes of one indestructible obstacle, one minor obstacle that slows the player but lights up the surrounding area and 2 pickups that provided 1 out of 4 powerups at random. We also had a level system consisting of 4 levels and a tutorial.

What went well with the final segment of the development process was that we had a good structure so we knew what needed to be in the final build and which features that we could skip without hurting the game. As I said before, we managed to work on the game up until the very end without risking causing any bugs on the night before, so we effectively got a bit of extra time in on polishing the game. What went less well was that the final week we encountered our first impactful communication problems. They thankfully only resulted in some assets ending up in a less polished state.

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In the end I managed to learn a bit more about how Unity works and specifically how to import and record animations in Unity. I also learned the value of clearly communicating with the team. However, my main takeaway is that animating on multiple layers with a frame by frame technique absolutely sucks. So i created some macros in Photoshop that helped me with getting through the final animations slightly quicker. I also feel like I learned a lot about movement and the “flow” of an animation during the project since I was doing so much animating.

So overall we had a very stable development cycle and managed to accomplish the things we set out to do, despite some mishaps along the way.