Post #6 – Postmortem
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Introduction For about six months I have been working with Group Siren in my major, Game Design at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. As I am writing this we have completed three projects together: a board game based inspired by the digital game “The Binding of Isaac”, a concept document for a digital game we named “Beezerker” and lastly a digital shoot ‘em up, Behemoth. In this Postmortem I will be writing about the last project we conducted together, Behemoth. What did we do? In Behemoth the player gets to control a giant organic ship which has been lying dormant on a planet for a long time, leaving its energy-level almost depleted. In an attempt to get to a large water supply you get found out by the planets native inhabitants who out of fear consider you to be hostile. Fend them off and get to the water! What went well? We chose the concept document Behemoth by Team Bugbear as it was one of the concepts that everyone in the group liked, but also because we felt that it was easily scalable. The reason we wanted to work on a scalable concept is that we only have one programmer in the group, thus which meant the project would be difficult to complete, should he (Jonathan) get sick or injured. In order to further mitigate the aforementioned risk, we also made sure that the course requirements were met way ahead of each deadline (Alpha, Beta, Final). Seeing how Jonathan did not get sick or injured meant we had a fair amount of time left for polishing and balancing based on the feedback we received from online playtesting. In addition we had a thorough style guide which made the in-game assets consistent. What could have gone better? At times sickness would occur leaving one or severals members unable to attend a daily standup meeting or even a sprint planning meeting, leaving enough room for misunderstandings that we had two artists producing the same art asset separately which is sub-optimal to say the least. Working on separate locations with, at times, insufficient communication through slack or discord also caused a couple of misunderstandings, where two members would think that they were talking about the same thing and then realize the were not after spending hours working on what they thought the other member asked them to do. Lessons Learned
So what did we actually end up producing? The game we made, Behemoth is a topdown shoot ’em up game where the player avatar is a large ship, on the left hand side of the screen. The aesthetic goal was “Feeling like you are operating a heavy machine”, we interpreted “heavy” as somewhat “slow and clunky”. Unlike most shoot ’em up games the player avatar is static with a large hitbox, instead of moving the ship itself buttons W and S are used to move a shield up and down in order to prevent projectiles from hitting the ship. Along with the shield the ship has a canon which aims toward the mouse, it does not aim toward the mouse straight away but rotates toward it slowly, to convey our interpretation of “heavy” to the player. The canon reloads for a couple of seconds after each shot, in other words, the player can not spam shots against enemies. The player has two resources, a) health and b) energy. The player looses a) whenever the ship is hit by an enemy projectile. The player gains b) over time as well as by killing enemies, after which the player can pick up the clusters of energy released when an enemy dies using the players shield. The player spends b) to heal or use power-ups. This along with the slow canon force a somewhat tactile approach to playing, in other words, keeping track of various things and planning ahead, which in my opinion goes hand in hand with the feeling of operating a heavy machine. Thank you! Thank you Samantha, Amanda and Jonathan for the pleasure of working with you, it has been great for me and I hope it has been for you too! (Bonus: Pictures taken while the group-logo came to be.)
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