The Umibozu game project has now been completed. It is time to discuss the end results, and perhaps more importantly what can be learned from this project before heading onto a new one.

I will say I am decently satisfied with the end result. We managed to deliver a simple but playable game based on the concept we had chosen. The end result was a functioning game with a main menu, a level with gameplay lasting somewhere around 10 minutes perhaps (depending on the player’s pace) and an ending sequence.

The Good

I find it best to start here by mentioning the first thing the player encounters, the main menu. This was a generally praised because of the way we implemented the backstory for the game into the main menu on the side as images where players could scroll through it. The general design philosophy behind this was that for those interested in story-driven games we’d want something to grab their attention while not forcing it on player’s who weren’t really interested in story and favored gameplay instead. Based on the feedback, we were certainly successful in the design of the main menu.

Looking upon the art style of the game, we were successful in maintaining overall coherent style though it may have lacked polish in some departments just to make it even more concise. I would contribute this result to the fact that we had set rules on the brushes, style and color palette that we, the artists, used.

As mentioned previously above, the game is in a playable state with functional gameplay and without any major game-breaking bugs.

The group dynamics during production of the game were usually pretty okay, but during development they seemed to get better with every week and there was a genuine respect for the workflow of each member to ensure higher productivity.

The Bad

There were some things that did not go according to plan though, which serve as a learning experience for design of future products. Among which is the fundamental design of the process in which a player locates the three evidence items before he or she can discover the Umibozu. We decided to use a compass which points in the direction of the nearest evidence, however players would still get lost and not discover these. Often staying confused before finally realizing where they were to go. In essence, we failed to communicate the purpose of the compass properly, as many players struggled to find the evidence items.

The previously mentioned failure of communication may simply have been a result of compromises we needed to do to meet the coming deadline at the time. The tutorial we originally planned to implement into the game level to teach the player had to be put into a tutorial page on the menu. This resulted in a lot of text, and as a result may likely not have communicated the mechanics and purpose in the game as efficiently as teaching the player through play would have. This would have been something I’d like to change as a lot of opportunity to improve the experience is lost without a tutorial while playing, and intuitive level design to teach the mechanics.

Finally, I find that the game may not have been as engaging as we hoped, and this may simply have come down to the original concept. There were elements in there that seemed interesting and engaging on paper, however when implemented and tested they did not work as effectively. This comes mainly down to the idea of lights and silhouettes in Umibozu, as pickups will always have different movement behavior to the enemies, making the enemies easy to spot based simply on the silhouette’s movement in the level. However, the silhouettes did manage to blend in with the fog which made enemies harder to spot and doing this increased difficulty and gave the spotlight mechanic a purpose.

Conclusion

The game is presentable but far from perfect. While there is no game-breaking bugs, it is impossible to say at this moment if some rare minor bugs are still hiding there that simply haven’t been discovered. I’d say the project was a decent success, and a valuable learning experience for future endeavors.

About Gunnlaugur Arnarson

2017 Graphics

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