Post Mortem
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After nine weeks of continuous frustration, hard work and dedication, the Aetherial video game was finally realized. It took a lot of determination from every team member, but in the end the results paid off. Our group managed to finish the development of the shoot ‘em up project in time and the upcoming gradings will show if we succeeded or not in fulfilling the requirements. During the process of development, I managed to encounter many unexpected difficulties that could have resulted in a backlash regarding the completion of the game. First and foremost, while the sprint planning gave a very exact idea of what was expected for the upcoming week, estimating the hours it would take for the completion of every asset proved to be hard. As a consequence, many of the art assets that were required in the days before the sprint review were not completed, therefore I felt the need to work on weekends to prevent falling back on schedule even further. This was mostly due to the lack of experience in creating the in-game sprites and animating them. Constantly underestimating the amount of work hours that were needed for each item created stressful situations which in turn resulted in the necessity of finding shortcuts. If it were not for the urgency of the weekly sprint review checklist, I would still not have learned how to use software such as Adobe After Effects, that helped in creating quick animations and that to this day proves to be indispensable in my workflow. Being fairly new to digital drawing and forced to create art assets for video games without specific technical knowledge given to me, I had to teach myself how to use different art creation software in order to achieve the given goals. This was one of the positive things that resulted from this process. Secondly, it became very clear that in order to create a well balanced game, it is absolutely necessary to have several playtests with people outside of the development circle. Being in contact with the game you are making at a daily basis, leads to getting used with all the aspects, even the bad ones. The game difficulty could also be included in this category, since most of our playtesters from the second session reported that completing all the three levels was practically impossible. Therefore, it was needed to reiterate the level design and adjust the health system and damage settings for the final presentation. But this was not the only issue regarding game mechanics. Testers have also helped us in tweaking the movement of the ship which the player controls, by giving us necessary feedback. Another mistake that was done as a result of in group playtesting was not providing a control scheme for the playtesting session. For us, the developers, the controls felt quite intuitive but apparently that was not the case. As a consequence, a short tutorial was introduced in the final build in the form of gameplay, where we showed illustrations that represented the buttons the player had to press. Finally, the game development process was heavily influenced by the group dynamic and at the same time suffered from it. In some specific cases, because of the lack of communication between the members of the group, several game ideas were not suggested properly therefore resulting in work conflicts, such as two programmers coding for the same item in the sprint planning which resulted in a serious waste of time and eventually having to reiterate each other’s progress in order to reach a common ground. In conclusion, during these past two months I managed to conceive an approximate image of what is needed for the production of a video game. From artistic skills, the ability to master different software packages in short periods of time, to the importance of playtesting outside of the group and, the most important, making things work within the team despite of the personality clashes, being part of group Archon has proved to contribute quite massively to my development as an individual artist, as well as a team member. The knowledge that I have gained producing the Aetherial game will be of much use and value for the upcoming development of the arcade game. The final result proved to be a game that I was proud of. It was unfinished from many points of view but a great piece of work for being the first full length video game project that any of the members have ever made. It had a few bugs in which the player ship would collapse into the game objects or beyond the outer frame of the game area. It was also poorly balanced from a game design’s perspective. The power up bar depleted too fast and the power pickups were not spawned often enough to help the player survive through the levels. During the final playtest, not too many players managed to reach the final level, not to even mention defeating the final boss and completing the game. From a graphic point of view the game lacked some animations states for one of the enemy. The timing of the death and dash animation of the player was off by a couple of seconds due to my lack of experience in implementing assets into Unity and leaving that task at the hand of the programmers who were already to busy with other items on the backlog list. Many of the particle effects in the game were made in a hurry and did not exactly fit with our predefined aesthetic. Nonetheless, considering the fact that we had so little time to work on a 2d shoot’ em project with other colleagues that shared the same experience in making video games, the final result turned out to be something to be very glad of.  |
