Aetherial post mortem
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In retrospective I am generally quite happy with the overall development of ‘Aetherial’, of course there are things that could have gone more smoothly or been better, but considering this was our first project of that size I am quite happy with the results. The final product had a lot of improvements, visually and mechanically, since the beta version of the game. Most of the negative feedback we got was addressed in one of the last sprints and a lot of the more annoying bugs were fixed. This said the final product was by no means bug free, but we managed to fix most of the game breaking bugs and our game systems were working as intended. However some of the changes we made in our last sprint introduced more bugs, which were quite difficult to fix and ended up making it to the final version. This is partially due to our lack of experience with Unity, but also some could have been avoided by better quality assurance and more internal testing. Design wise I believe we tried our best to make a working game of a somewhat lacking Design Document. However I think we didn’t spend enough time communicating the vision of the aesthetics to every team member. We did hold plenty of design meetings, but nonetheless we still ended up creating a different game than we had discussed at these meetings. I believe the reason for that to be that not only were there people absent at some of these meetings, but also not everyone immediately asked questions whenever there was something unclear for them. We didn’t finish the meetings after everything was cleared up, but rather after everyone stopped asking questions. I think if we had succeeded in refining our design ideas and aesthetic goals then we could have made a much better game overall. I think most of the time we functioned well as a group, but we had some issues where people didn’t do what they were supposed to or only quite lackluster and in addition to that many people missed multiple meetings due to sickness. So I suppose these issues slowed down our group work in general and while not all of these delays and absents were within our power to prevent I believe it still had a negative impact on group morale and motivation. The game we produced consisted of three stages: One tutorial level, two scripted levels and a boss fight. The tutorial, which was a last second decision to put into the game actually worked quite well and most players found it easy to learn the controls through it. The two levels gave the player ample opportunity to learn how to use the games mechanics in a more in-depth manner, while also mixing things up with different enemy types and challenges. At the end of the game we had prepared a bossfight, which ended up a lot less interesting than we had hoped for. Basically the entire game leads up to that fight, with the player having multiple run-ins with the final boss of the game. Still the final battle felt clunky and underwhelming as a whole. This was mostly due to us not starting on the final boss design early enough and also lack of QA, which could have prevented some bugs and annoying interactions. Looking back I am quite happy with the game we produced, even though it was plagued by a few annoying bugs that did have an impact on the player experience. Overall I believe that the game did succeed in conveying it’s aesthetic goal of feeling like a champion, although it did have the side effect of making the player feel alone and sometimes even overwhelmed. The boss fight we included in our game was quite ambitious but also quite necessary for the core concept of our game to succeed. As a result we did end up having a boss fight which was the cause of most bugs. A lot of these bugs were caused by issues I wasn’t equipped to deal with as I was quite new to coding in unity. Besides these bugs there were other issues with the boss fight, for one the boss ended up being a bit boring to fight, since his attacks were very slow and repeated quite often. But more importantly I am very happy with what I have learned over the course of the development process. Not only hard skills, such as coding and sound design, but also a lot of experiences when it comes to working as a team. So overall I am quite happy with the game we produced, but even more with what I learned over the course of the development period.  |