Blog:6 Postmortem
PostmortemWhat’s the end result of what you have learned?
For a few weeks now me and my group (Kraken) have been working hard with completing this project, and its finally over. After all our hard work and struggle the time has come to reflect over what we have learnt.
Well, what has this project been about? What am I talking about, what project? In my previous blogs I have been talking about how my group and I have been working on making a shoot em up game, Atherial. I won’t go into depth what the game is about (You can read about that in my previous blogs) but now I want to focus on what I will take with me from this experience.
ReflectionThis was the first time ever I made a complete game and it was a most interesting experience. Of course I was very excited to work on this project but it was a lot different from what I expected.
For starters I thought we would have a bit more freedom working with the concept. In the beginning of the project we had to discussing what we could change with the original concept and it was very uncertain of how much we could change. Our group had (kind of) chosen to work with the game concept Atherial, sadly so did a lot of other groups. Since there were so many Atherial games not that many remembered our game or even tried it. Because even tho the games looked different it still felt like playing the same game. It would have been fun to have worked with one of the less mainstream concepts, in order to stand out. But you can’t foresee things like these. But one thing we could have done would have been to change the mechanics of the game and maybe changed the environmental settings, which was all pretty much the same in all the different versions of atherial.
Our group had been working together for a while, but while working in a group it can be hard to keep track on everything and everyone. Thankful the institutions gave us the work concept of scrum, wich made everything a whole lot easier. I can easily say that this project has been nothing but a rollercoaster. You can never really anticipate how much time you have to work with each task or how long they will will take. Sometimes you think you have all the time in the world, then all of sudden you have only one day to complete a task or something completely new appears. Still scrum helped a lot with this and made everything a whole lot less stressed. You put all the tasks into a time schedule and have daily stand ups, to keep track on every group members progress and make sure you don’t overlook anything. When your working within a time schedule you’ll have to learnt to prioritize some tasks first.
What hasn’t been goodDespite all of this our game lacked a red thread, which was a result of the group not working as unit but trying to do everything individually at their own time. Therefore, we were never really on the same page and you can truly see that in the final result of the game. There was a lot of bugs and the art style was extremely different from one and other, we didn’t manage to fit all the individual pieces together. This was something we didn’t really realize until the very last weeks of the project.
End resultI have learnt that it is important to work together in a group that sometimes it’s not enough to meet just a few times a week but you have to stick together with most of the parts of the project. This project has been fun, sure there are a few things I wish that we would have done differently, but that’s now all in the past. It’s time to look forward to the future and get excited for the arcade games.  |