Postmortem: Team Qilin’s Aetherial
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Finally! The end has come! This project have been somewhat hellish, and reaching the end feels more freeing than I’d care to admit (although I suppose I just did). Many things went wrong, but many things did also go right, and the fact that we made it is something I’m very proud of.
In the end, team Qilin’s Aetherial turned into a quite simple shoot ‘em up in which players operate a flying ship hunting down a murderous invading Moby Dick inspired alien whale. The game itself has simple mechanics, the ship shoots harpoons at four types of enemies that approach from the right and below, killing them with a single blow. Through the three levels and boss fight, the background gets progressively darker to simulate the sun setting and time passing as the ship ventures further on it’s revenge quest. After the third level there is a boss level in which the player confronts the whale and ultimately kills it, sending it spiralling into the sea of clouds below. There are two different power ups in the game, one to speed up the players movement and one to increase the firing rate of the harpoon. The speed up is not very useful in gameplay, but many people seemed to like it, and so we kept it. In hindsight, the reason it received such positive feedback may have been because it was the only powerup available and so there wasn’t much choice. The increased firing rate is slightly better, it actually has an effect on the gameplay and is as such not completely redundant. In the game there are, as previously stated, three levels and one boss fight, as well as a short “tutorial” in which players simply get the input explained. In the first level there are two types of enemies and each of the following levels introduce a new enemy. This was to give players a chance of mastering one challenge before adding a new one, and it seemed to work somewhat. Unfortunately, our boss level turned out quite terrible, it was unbalanced and poorly tested.
What Went Right
One of the things we got lots of great feedback on was the art! So I would say that’s a positive! Being one of the artists, that makes me feel really happy. We took a lot inspiration from the original Aetherial concept document, as is to be expected, but felt like we wanted to redo it in our fashion. The original colour scheme was very orange and had only highly saturated colours that were in sharp contrast to each other, it felt loud to look at. We wanted a slightly more relaxed palette, to have it feel softer and less aggressive. So we basically traded the red of the original for a softer fuschia-esque hue and made the yellow less saturated so that it would be kinder on the eyes. We kept the original idea of having a darker blue in there as well, however, we went for a more dark turquoise with light blue highlights. This was the colour of all of the enemies, so that they would have a coherent colour scheme. We couldn’t really control the fact that our art styles are different, so we split it so that I made the boss, ship and background and our other artist made all the enemies. The colour further tied the enemies together as to make it easier for the player to know what was an enemy or not. We tried to work quite closely on the art and I think that was good! The thing that tied everything together the most was probably the colour and the crystals, but I think that we reached a fairly coherent art style in general.
We always had this idea of the story of the game, so that we could base our design choices off of something. In the concept document, there was some plot that we used as inspiration and justification for some things, but as the end neared we realized that we wanted more narrative, so we sat down and looked over the plot. We decided that the best way to add the plot would be through some kind of still-frame cutscenes, but that was then cut down to only one single frame that players could pass without looking at it if they so pleased. This last minute addition was, surprisingly, one of the things we got the most positive feedback on. People seemed to appreciate getting some motivation for why they were killing all of these flying creatures. There was a plan to have more “cutscenes”, but we unfortunately ran out of time, otherwise I think that might have been a redeeming quality for the other, less good parts of the game. For example, we wanted a cutscene at the end in order to make it seem less abrupt and to save me from having to animate even more of the boss whale, as well as a cutscene explaining the portals at the end of each level.
We actually made a game that works to play and that isn’t awful, and I’m incredibly impressed with us. Somehow, despite the dysfunctional nature of our group, there is a game. Something obviously went right since it all kind of worked, we managed to work together despite our differences and through excessive amounts of fika and tea, here we are. Our meetings were mostly impossibly long, but we at the end managed to make decisions that worked to make a game.
What Went Wrong
Our team was objectively kind of awful. Or rather, most of our team was functioning and then there was one person who just couldn’t work with the rest of us. We never really had any kind of team spirit, we never did the whole “have a fika and get to know each other” thing, nor the “watch a movie” thing, nor even the “let’s talk about anything other than the project” thing. So it’s not massively surprising that when push came to shove we had little understanding or knowledge about each other, something that affected our work a lot. At the beginning of this project, we had a temporary addition to the ranks, an outside programmer. He was involved because one person didn’t trust that we could make a game as we were and therefore made the call to involve outside help without properly consulting the rest of the team. This addition resulted in a lot of inside competition as the two programmers would work on completely separate code and then the ‘better’ version would be chosen. After three or so weeks, the rest of the team had enough and started making noise about the situation and it was finally resolved after teacher intervention. The outside programmer left and we reverted back to our own programmer’s version of the game, but the problems remained. The results of this rather unfortunate chapter of our lives was an even more dysfunctional group than before. Where before we didn’t know each other, we now straight out didn’t properly trust each other. It’s hard to trust a person who doesn’t believe that the team can handle a task that we’ve been set by our teachers and that every other team in the history of this education, as far as we’ve been told, have passed. If there is one dubiously positive thing that came out of this it’s that it united the rest of us against the insitor of this. After it all, our team meetings became the team vs our manager, and it’s really hard to have an open and creative discussion about design in a hostile environment. The event slowed us down a lot in other ways as well, we lost a lot of motivation, as one is want to do when someone who’s supposed to have your back tells you your work is subpar.
We also had some technical issues within art specifically (since I was lead art), such as not picking a resolution and size for our game. This was something we artists pushed quite hard for, since it was one of the things our graphics teacher was keen on, but that was never resolved. In the end we settled on the classic 1920x1080px size, but at that point we had also made some placeholder art that was in 800x450px and I do believe some of those assets remained in the final game. I personally also had a tendency to draw on really big canvases since we didn’t really know how big things were supposed to be, which meant that 1) Unity didn’t really want to deal with my files and they instead became really low resolution and 2) everything I made had to be scaled down a bunch and so the lines became thinner, which made assets not match. We did have the same brush and brush size, however, we didn’t have the same canvas size and so it was just kind of pointless. The end result of all that was fairly large variation in line thickness and level of detail on different assets. For example, the ship and the sky ray don’t really look like they belong in the same universe. Had we sat down fairly early on and decided on the relative size of all the assets we might have counteracted this problem. We could also have gone the line art free route, but we would still have had the issue of level of detail. Less experimentation in the art department, especially on my part, would probably have helped. Clearer communication and faster decision making would have been the quickest and easiest way to have solved this, alas, that wasn’t really team Qilin’s style.
Looking through the feedback we received on the final playtest, both from testers and teachers, our biggest failure was definitely the boss. It wasn’t tested enough, it didn’t challenge the skills honed throughout the game, it was too long, and it kept moving in places you couldn’t shoot. We always planned to have a boss, and I animated ít way too early on, for an assignment in graphics class, which meant that when we reached the point where we maybe should have thought about downscaling and optimizing, we didn’t want to cut things we’d spent so much time on. We hastily made a boss fight for the beta mostly for the sake of having a boss fight and then never really had the heart to cut it. Cutting it would probably have made the game better, but we were a bit too cowardly to take such drastic measures. Had we had more time we could have tested the boss better and realized the faults present, but we ran out of time and instead opted to just settle. On the other hand, we made a boss! It wasn’t a good boss, but it was a boss nonetheless.
And so I’m incredibly proud of us. We survived. We didn’t actually split the team up, no one died, we stuck it out and now we at least know that we can survive and produce something even when the atmosphere is awful. We have learnt massive amounts of knowledge and so I guess you could say it’s been a good learning experience.  |