Postmortem

It has been a tough past 10 weeks for all of us, we have all been very busy trying to keep up with our sprints, we have argued between each other, we have planned, created and we have given our all. I am happy to say I am pleased with our game and all of the other ones. Good job to everyone!

1. The team

Personally I am pleased on how well we, Team Poltergeist, have worked together. We are a group of four members, Natasha our Lead Programmer, William our lead Designer, Anders our Project Manager and I, lead Artist.

We went from not knowing our schedules to learning what we all needed and the times we could meet together. Natasha and I also figured out a day, time and place were we could work together. At the beginning we did not speak up as much, and by the end we were all saying our opinions and our ideas.

As a summary, Anders did a fine job organizing our daily sprint meet ups, they almost always worked for all of us. Natasha worked great solving obstacles and reaching out to people when help was needed. William did a fantastic work with the enemies and the GUI of our game, it looked great and fitted the game aesthetics and theme very well. I worked on the main characters, backgrounds and comics, which turned out good too. It was all a team effort, which I think we managed to do. We all did a great job!

2. The Game

The concept of our game was friendship, and we have made every decision to reach this aesthetic. There is three main characters who are friends and have to fight robots together to be able to save themselves.

We started by making the playable character, one enemy and the power up, which would spawn a friend with AI that could help you win.

Alpha Test

In our first play testing, we tested the core game mechanics. The movement of the players and enemies, the attacks and how everything felt. Feedback was mostly stuff we already knew, however people didn’t feel like the mechanics met our aesthetic or that the power up helped in anyway.

After the Alpha test we had to make a few changes to the game to reach beta.

To start off, we created the three friends and the three kinds of enemies. Natasha made the friends AI smarter. At first, we wanted the friends to have special abilities and a wide range of animations. However, with the time we had, we decided to cut those features out. This meant that we had a balancing and aesthetic problem. If the friends didn’t do anything special, then why would the players want to keep them safe? We then decided to give them ‘special’ guns instead, which had more power and could definitely help you out when playing the game, plus with the new AI, it would come in handy. Everything was developed in a way that would force you to protect them and have them around. It is very hard for the player to finish the game if the friends die.

In another note, we also added the parallax background, and the basic animations of the characters and enemies.

Beta Test

During the Beta play test, people felt more compelled to help their friends. Feedback was very good, people liked the mechanics and the power ups. Everything was working except for the controls.

So, after Beta, we had to balance the game more, add the sounds, I made more spawning animations that gave the characters more personality and life, we implemented all of the animations, the parallax background transitions were implemented, we decided to add the story in the form of a comic, the win screen, we fixed the controls by asking some people what could work best, so from an all keyboard we made them mouse and keyboard and we polished of some other details.

Release

Finally, we had a game that was working, that felt like friendship and looked good. There was still a bit of stuff we could’ve improved but I feel pretty good on what we did with the time we had.

The game started with you crashing on a planet finding your friends and attacking robots to progress. After finding your friends, getting their help then you would get into a ship and be able to leave the planet, thus winning the game.

The ended up having five levels, each one adding more difficulty to the last one. The levels where indicated by color changes. There was no major differences but the fact that we added two different and harder enemies.

What I have learned

I learned that not all production time is actually used for production. There is so much more to it, planning is one of those things I didn’t expect would take that much time. I realized that sometimes I thought something would take me n amount of hours but then it would take a couple more, because there are so many things that we don’t think will happen or won’t happen.

I also learned that working in group for such a long period of time can be very exhausting and that we need time to relax and keep in ourselves in mind.

Sound design is something that is often overlooked and it is so very important. I learned not to leave it for the end. It gives so much to the game, from player feedback, to emotions and hints.

Overall, I think the game turned out pretty well. We managed to keep our aesthetic goal, the game works, it is fun to play and it looks pretty good. I am very proud of our team :).

Ana Laura Martinez

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