“They’re not dead, they just lay down and rest… forever”
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Postmortem
The game is finally finished! Our first game. I am very happy and proud to present Beeloning. If you want to try the game press the link below: https://team-mimic.itch.io/beelonging
One of the things I think we did well is the graphics, specifically that the art looks coherent and it looks like it is all made by the same person. Me and my fellow artist Moa, achieved that by showing each other our sketches when working on a new design for assets and giving each other feedback. And when we painted, we would check each others work that was already done for the game, and make sure that we had painted it in the same way. For an example, to see what colours we used for the honey, so it would look the same throughout the game. All the art assets we put on Slack, giving everyone in the team access to everything and it also worked as a good platform to give and get feedback from the whole team. Another thing that we did good, was to start with the boss fight early in the process. Had we saved it for later we would have missed out the opportunity to test it out on the playtest. We also had more time to tweak it and try to improve it. A boss fight wasn’t a criteria to pass the course, but we knew we wanted to have one right away. To set your goals high is a good thing. Even if you don’t know how to make something, decide to do it. If you want to do it you will gather the necessary skill to do it – thus, learn a lot. What we could have done better is that we could have put some more effort on the music and sounds of the game. We didn’t even start working on the sounds until very late in the development process. And the same goes for the level design. That was also not really put much effort into until late in the development, thus we lost valuable playtesting feedback on our level designs. Some people are asking why we didn’t implement a high score system. The aesthetics of the game is to feel part of something bigger and to feel belonging. It is not about defeating the most enemies that you can. The story is that you are rushing to your hive so save your friends and your hive, so just trying to avoid the enemies works just as well for that.
Doing this shoot ‘em up I have learned so much! I have learned how scrum works and I have gained more experience in working with Unity. But mostly I have learned how to make animations, sprite sheets, and I have become a lot more proficient with Photoshop. I have learned how to use many of photoshops tools and found new ways to do things and thus I have become a more efficient as a games artist. However, throughout this development process I have also learned a lot about game design and game development. When making a game you really get to see what works well in a game and not, and the playtesting helps with that a lot. Although, I learned even more about the game development process. Because this time we really got to try it out and make a game. Next up is making an arcade game. I am so excited! Now we know more about developing games, so we should be able to create awsome games in the next project!  |
