Postmortem

During this course, me and my group made a swamp version of the game Umibozu. The finished product turned out well but could be better if some major bugs were fixed.

As mentioned before the end result of the game turned out well. We had a working product, but it did have some bugs. The main mechanics of the game was to move around in the environment while killing enemies in your path. The main goal of the game was to reach the end of the game where you would find the monster you’ve been searching for (Umibozu), and then you would have completed the game.
One major bug we had was that the player never really had to move around in the environment because if the player would get stuck by a rock or a tree for example the boat would just teleport you through the obstacle behaving like you moved around it. This meant that a player never really had to respect the environment and just move either to the far right or the far left of the screen and teleport through all the obstacles without the fear of enemies killing them. Our coder tried to fix this problem but couldn’t figure out how. That was the biggest flaw of our end result.

One thing that I learned was that our game was probably a little bit too long (5 minutes) related to what the player was able to do in the game. After three minutes of game time some players asked whether the game had an ending or not. Additionally, after that time the gameplay seemed too become too repetitive for most people, losing the interest in the game. In my future games, I will be doing my best to prevent this from happening again.
Making the game 2 levels that were approx. 2,5 minutes each would probably be better than one big level that was 5 minutes. In the second level, there would be some art and level design differences and other enemies to diversify the gameplay a little bit more. This would most likely keep the players engaged in the game a little longer.

Another thing I learned was that it can be hard to balance a game that you are constantly playing and becoming better and better at, thus making it harder than you want it to be for the regular player.  Therefore, playtesting is great! You get a lot of new ideas and balance tips from players that play your game for the first time. Having regular playtests for people outside the game development team is definitely something to keep on doing moving forward!

That’s it for me for now, Thank you!

About August Demirsson

2017 Game Design

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