Postmortem!

What did you change from the initial plan? 

• There were a few things that were tweaked from the original plan, but overall we stuck pretty close to our original idea for this game. Some things that got changed were done so to fit with the optional challenges such as adding a health bar; while other changes were more for juice. An example of this would be the moving red platforms that dissolve in when the red lens was toggled on. Another aspect that was expanded on was the reason behind the player entering and exiting the game as a real person. The original idea was that the player was simply going through to collect these different lenses as a challenge, but later it was changed to the player getting sucked into the game and needing all the lenses to get out, which was mainly incorporated by the cut scenes at the end and beginning of the game.  

What went right with your final project?

• The thing that went right with our project was definitely the different lens pathways. This was the main focus and mechanic of our game and we believe that the finished product was what we had envisioned. Each member was proud of how the effects and separate pathways worked together. Another aspect that came together nicely was the cutscene at the beginning and ending of the game, this helped really tie together the main premise and reasoning behind the game. We think that the low graphical intensity served our game well, given the complexity of the map as a whole the individual meshes and texture remaining simple strengthened the overall look and tied nicely into the games primary color theme.

What went wrong with your final project?

• A few things went wrong with our project, some of which being player movement, respawning bugs, interactions with the wind elements, and double jumping. We had consistent issues arise from the player movement script, because our game is a platformer the movement had a hand in the creation and function of many of our mechanics. This would create change reactions where in external scripts would break movement then the movement scripted had to be retooled which would break other scripts.

What would you do differently next time?

• We would definitely choose not to use Unity Version Control and stick with Github from the start. Another thing we would do would be setting up times when people could work on the project just to keep better track of who is and isn’t working on the project. Although another idea would be each person gets a test scene to work in and once everything is working and finished it would get moved into the main scene.  

If you could add one more week of development, what would you add?

• Due to the bugs and problems we were facing the ending got a little rushed, if there was one more week we would have spent it on getting the ending polished and adding text or a cutscene showing the player where they needed to go. We might have also redone some of the sound effects and added more juicy interactions. 

"I think we did well for the time we had, but we did end up losing a lot of time since Unity Version Control took a while to work. This project helped me work on my low-poly modeling skills as well as learn how to use shader graphs." - Kelsey Melott

"I was able to explore more into developing video game audio which is something I have been wanting to experiment more with in my projects. I was also proud of this game overall as it was my first major game developed in Unity 3d." - Stephanie Ramirez

"This game ended up being a bit more ambitious than we had time for. However, I think the end result turn out pretty well with in the time frame of the assignment. I had the opportunity to learn quite a lot about unity's particle systems, and continued to practice environment design work." - Yasha Bell