Done! Post mortem for Depth

I’ll start off by saying that even though my feelings towards the game are mixed, overall I am satisfied with it, and think it turned out well. I’m also happy with my team, we’ve had some friction, but I feel we managed to work with it, also there is a lot of talent in group Ettin, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity to work with them.

So what went right?

The final playtest gave overall positive feedback, so I’ll take that as an indication that our game was “fun”, which I feel is the case even though it has it’s faults.

Workflow was something I feel was pretty good in the mid to late stages of development. We had regular work meetups and good hours. This allowed for good communication and overall a nicer work experience with some chatting.

User stories went well in the group as well, our designer did a good job writing these, and especially in the early stages of the game this helped me as a programmer when coding.

We took feedback to heart I felt, and did an honest job trying to fix issues brought up by playtesters. The team also did an awesome job noting down reactions from testers, which helped a lot. Things like confusion or excitement at certain points in the game don’t always make it into the survey, but noting them down while they are playing ensures we get the data.

Our art assets look awesome,  Benjamin Harbakk and Ellen Wetterholm did a great job with them. The quality and style is consistent, and this helps with the moe polished look of the game.

Our designer Hampus Serrestam also did a great job with the level design. We only have two levels, a tutorial and the “main” level, but the main level is pretty lengthy. They have a good design and this helps with the polished feel of the game.

What went wrong or could have been done better?

I won’t go through the problems we had with scrum and communication, as I’ve already written about it in another post. But yeah, we had some problems, especially communication problems in the early stages.

I said our workflow was good in the mid-late stage of the project, outside of this is was not the best. In the early stages of the game we did not meet up much, and in the late stages of the games there was a lot of crunching.

Testing, which I feel ties a little into our workflow problem. I would have liked us to test a lot more, everyone playing the game at a regular basis. This also leads into my next point.

Unity collaborate. We didn’t run into the problems a lot of other groups have, I think this is just because I was the only programmer, and therefor we didn’t have any problems with script merging. Our problem was just the team cap, we were 5 members, but only had 3 slots. This meant that only 3 members had easy access to the game, this made it hard for the others to playtest the game. Collaborate was introduced late in development as well, so before that I was the only one who had easy access, combine this with irregular meetups and bad communication, I ended up being the only one tweaking values and trying out the feel of features in the early part of development. This I feel was our biggest fail.

The end product

The game we ended up with is often a hit or a miss. A single mistake can quickly lead to a not so fair death and frustration. Showing the game around I’ve seen some who die over and over, never really getting anywhere before quitting, others beat the game on the first try and enjoy the game.

A lot of this comes from design decisions we made early in development and were never questioned later, an example of this is walls dealing damage. Picture this, you are fleeing a monster that wants to eat you, but end up miss timing a boost so you crash into a wall and die, without the spooky monster really doing much. This draws focus away from the monster, and also helps produce some negative feedback loops that can end up killing you after hitting one wall, which I deem as bad design.

I had one friend play the game, which I think is one of my prouder moments in life. He had the tensest playthrough of Depth I’ve seen, through the entire game he was only moments from death, and finished with one health left and a big smile on his face. That was probably the most perfect game of Depth that has ever been played, where the desired aesthetic was truly reached.

So I’ll end this part by saying that I think Depth does some things right, which lead to a good experience, but there is also a lot of noise that can end up distracting from this, and for some it can ruin the experience.

What I’ve learned

Starting out on this project I had barely touched unity but now, although I still would consider myself a beginner, I feel way more comfortable working with it.
This goes for game development in general, at the end of this I feel satisfied with the experience I’ve gained. Things like scoping, iteration, scrum, etc. are best taught through doing.

Not dragging this out to much, I’ll end with saying that I’m happy with my game and group, and this has been an eventful first big (bigger than a jam) game project.

That’s it for me, we’ll see if I post more here now that the project is done, although I think I’ll move to somewhere else cause I hate this blog name,
Wiktor Ravndal

About Wiktor Ravndal

2017 Programming

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