Blog 6: Umibozu Post Mortem
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Now that the course is over and our product is finished we had a final playtest to see what people thought of our game. We made a small survey to see what people thought of the end result of our game and what changes they would have personally made and the results we got were kind of unexpected in my opinion. The survey we used contained a couple of general questions about the game, what people thought of it, the difficulty and what kind of changes they would personally make to the game. The answers were got were that our players thought an on average that the game was pretty good where most of the players thought the game was a 8/10 which is pretty satisfactory to me since there were a lot of problems in our group in terms of creative differences and poor planning. In the end product there were many who said that there were many functions in our game that were unclear and some things that weren’t explained properly which led to a lot of confusion when playing. One major problem we noticed was that it was unclear to the player that they would actually die when they ran out of energy in their spotlight which of course led to people being really confused over why they died. We had made it so that the energy meter would flash when it started getting low so people who see and hopefully understand that it was getting low. We had also included a short tutorial at the start of the game to make the player understand that if they ran out of energy in their spotlight they would die but for some reason there were many that did not understand that.
During this project there were a lot of ups and downs and the things that went pretty good were for example when we did our work it was done pretty fast so that we could prototype it for quick feedback. Another things that went well was that we didn’t have a lot of problems when working with unity. Any problem that our programmer ran into was often solved pretty quick which led to a lot more working time and space. There was also a lot I learned in terms of design and teamwork throughout this course and now that I have learned this from this course I hope I can avoid these going into future courses and projects. As mentioned earlier the creative differences we ran into was a major problem, but then again when you look back at it you can see where and why it became a problem. The things that didn’t go so well was our communication in the team where sometimes we would wait until the last-minute to test some assets and if there weren’t good enough that became a problem. Another big issue as mentioned earlier was the creative differences in our team which led to a lot of conflict and problems between certain group members. We also never really worked together as a group in the same room, stuff was always done in separate locations so we could never give real-time feedback to the assets that were being done. We should have also paid a lot more attention and focused on getting the proper assets ready for the playtests, since that was also one of our major problems when it came to the playtests. We never had anything proper to test and so we couldn’t get any good feedback regarding the game and we managed to make this mistake twice so we never learned anything that we could change from the playtests. One example was that for the first playtests we didn’t have the fog ready for the game, which is a huge part of the Umibozu game, and because of that we couldn’t test the difficulty of the game or really see what changes had to be done. In the end there were a lot more things that we could have improved in our final product, but there were a lot of creative differences throughout the course which then led to things being delayed and as also mentioned earlier poor planning in terms of stand up meetings, which we had a maximum of 5 throughout the entire course. In the end I wasn’t really satisfied with the end product since there were a lot of things that could have easily been improved on but was never taken the time to change or improve upon. The final product is fine, there are no major bugs or gamebreaking features but there is a lot lacking in terms of mechanics and “fun”. Our game was described by one of the playtesters very well. He told us the game looks very good, but it felt like the game’s mechanics were not really working with the art style which in turn led to the game feeling very weak and didn’t work very well. Working on this project was a good working experience and since I learned a lot from working on this I know how to avoid ceratin problems in the future when working on other projects.  |
