Postmortem

Successes:

The biggest success of the project is undoubtedly the game itself. At the beginning, we decided to have a witch as the main character which set up the main theme for the game. We designed the scenes based on the main theme. The ground and moving platforms are stone, the traps are lava and magic lasers and the monsters are slimes and bats. All of which are consistent with the main theme. We also adapt a big boss for the final level to make the whole game a novel without text as well as setting up an ultimate goal for witch to save her cat. Apart from scene settings, we adapt other settings that would improve the game such as separate hearts and potions. We also adapt interesting game settings to decorate the game. For instance, using three potions at the same time would double the damage of the witch, making it easier to fight the boss. Bats would approach the witch with a curved trajectory.

Challenges:

Most challenging of all must be the team cooperation. At first we demonstrate to assign tasks based on people’s preference, although it is proven that everyone has done their jobs to a satisfactory level, the efficiency of that is less satisfying. Fortunately, the efficiency is improved after collaboration through frequent communication through discord and team member’s responsibility. Tasks are further divided into different modules such as moving platforms, art work, monsters, etc. Modularized tasks improve the efficiency of the whole project. We only need to be familiar with our own modules and understand the basic concept of each module. Combining all the modules together creates the final game.

What we learned:

The process of making the project teaches us a lot. First of all, cooperation usually is more efficient than solo work. Previously, we were more accustomed to debugging by ourselves. During the project, if we were stuck in a bug for a period of time, we were able to turn to our teammates for help which could usually provide us with a new insight of the error and lead us to the solution. 

Also, during the project, I further learned the significance of several moves taught by the professor in class. For example, previously during the exercises, I would simply duplicate the game object rather than add it to prefabs since duplication is more convenient for modifying each game object. However, the large workload of the project determines that the convenience of using prefabs is much more advantageous than duplication especially when doing the cross-level changes of certain game objects. Besides, the use of the Public Variants file is also quite useful during this project as most of the important variants are placed in the PublicVars file for more convenient uses and clearer context of the variables used.

Possible revision:

Because of the time limits, we abandoned some initial designs that could be time-consuming which might be revised in the future such as using three different potions that would lead to different effects such as speeding up or jumping higher. What’s more, different magic effects could be implemented for different wands and maybe the setting of using magic skills could be introduced. Besides, to make the game more interesting, the boss’s behavior pattern could be updated to, for instance, attack in a different pattern corresponding to the percentage of remaining life-bar like the boss in HollowKnight or Binding Of Issac.