Postmortem

Hello Again! Today I will write about the end result of the game and a reflection on the project.

Making process

The making process of the game was a bit like a roller coaster for me as a game designer, starting with confusing instructions in the beginning of the course. The instruction for the designers that was given by our minor course, Test Driven Game Design 2, was to primarily work with user stories and make tasks out of them for each new coming week within the scrum methodology. The course director of the major course Game Design 2 on the other hand gave an opposite instruction. The instruction was to scrap the user stories and make a complete backlog as a group to then hand it in, on the end of the first week of work.

These instructions affected the workflow from a designer’s perspective in a negative way. This was our first prominent project and I as a designer felt already felt lost with my role and in most part a non-contributing member in the beginning phase of the project. This was due to the fact that the majority part of the design work with user stories had been scrapped, having to plan the work of the entire project on the starting phase, and the fact that most of the design work was already made in the concept document of the game. The unsureness of my role went on for a few days until we as a group decided to dissected the concept document. We decided to re-design some game mechanics that we did thought needed to change and implement new ones. This opened up more game design work for me and kept me contributing throughout the whole project.

Other than the unsureness of my role as designer, the overall work from our graphic students and our programmer was outstanding, I think we all had a great work ethic. For the majority part we all worked separately, which is something I think we could have done differently and I truly believe it would have improved our game result if would have worked together in a room. Working in the same place would have given us a better work flow among other things by reducing the communication between members trying to explain what one has done, want to do, or how an asset should look like in the game. This problem resulted with cuts and changes we needed to do to meet the requirement of the given deadlines.

Reflection

The game is as of now finalized with all the requirements implemented. Personally, I am satisfied with what we have accomplished, but I still think that there are some improvements that can be done. We managed to develop a playable game that meets the course’s requirements. The game has a beautiful intro/backstory in form of images, a main menu, a tutorial, a gameplay that last’s about 10 minutes and an ending scene. In the end, the project was a decent success and it has been a good learning experience for me.

In reflection to my design work, I noticed that getting an understanding by researching on the subjects concerning the game’s theme, setting/environment, and aesthetic is very helpful. It gives you a starting base to come up with ideas and also an awareness of what can be implemented to the game in order to reach a specific aesthetic goal.

The method to research beforehand has stuck with me and it’s noticeable that I use it to take inspiration from the real world to then implement it to the game. For this particular game, it was obvious to research the around fishermen and fishing techniques from the 1600-1800s era, because the design of the game was set to an extend in a realistic setting, ignoring the fact that the player encounters a non-realistic entity named Umibozu.

About Teddy Chavez Alcarraz

2017 Game Design

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