Postmortem on Behemoth
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After many weeks of working together with my group, our game is finally finished and has been sent in to the teachers for grading. It was a fun project, but as the we started pushing into the last two weeks I started getting impatient and wanted it to be finished as fast as possible. Most people who played it said they enjoyed it, although it had some quite glaring issues. There were a lot of assets I really wanted to make, but didn’t have time to – but in the end I feel that our group did the best out of the situation we had found ourselves in.
We planned our game with two graphical students in mind, and after week #3 this proved to be an issue larger than we had initially anticipated. Our second artist felt unmotivated, and had quite a lot of trouble actually managing to finish tasks. Granted, I also were late for my first couple of weeks – but after I had caught up I felt more confident and could more easily finish my assets on time. After a couple of weeks of our second artist pretty much not getting any work done at all, she quit the program. This meant that all of the work that she hadn’t, and wouldn’t be able to finish in the future would instead be left to me to finish – including all the enemies of the game.
I did my best to finish the enemies, most of which you can see here on the blog – and I’m mostly happy with the results – even though I would’ve wanted them to be more detailed and more animated. The biggest reason I could spend
as much time I did on them, in fact, were because of our Game Designer, Eira – who graciously took on the task of making the intro-scene and the UI. This left me with enough time to finish up all the enemies, and other animations that needed to be added to the game. Art-wise, I have pretty much ranted enough about the things I would’ve liked to change. I would have wanted to make the animations more advanced, as of now they are mostly effects such as fire and smoke – and I would also have wanted to make some of the earlier sprites better so that they fit in with the rest in a nicer way. I would also have wanted to make a more advanced background, although I’m not sure how I could’ve made one as detailed as the one I have now without spending a ridiculous amount of time on it.
As for gameplay, I would have wanted a boss and some more over-all polish. I would also have resized some enemies to make them more visible and easier to target. In general though, I feel that developing this first game has been very beneficial in terms of making myself better at creating assets that will finally be put into a game. I achieved a better understanding of photoshop, now being able to create animations and more advanced painting in the program. I also had to quickly learn and adapt to the time it takes to create each individual assets, time management probably being my biggest weakness during the project – making myself work overtime during the last hours of each sprint. In the end, it turned out well for our group – despite our issues, and I now feel ready to start the next project. Thanks for reading!
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