looking back at my previous project

Recently my partners in my university course and I have been working on a fun little breeding simulation over the course of 6 weeks that takes into account the theory of heredity and genetics in an extremely light-hearted way through the use of fun little anthropomorphic food items including Pancakes, Blueberries and Ice-cream called “Sweet Peeps”. The concept was that the game would be placed on USB flash drives and when input they will open up an instance of the game and each player’s Sweet Peeps would interact with one another and walk around their bright and colourful home consisting of 5 rooms and a garden

Essentially we created our own inheritence  system that allows the food items to breed with one another and influences their genes that may change the outcome of their children in future generations. The chart below explains how the breeding between a pancake and a blueberry works, if a purebred pancake breeds with a purebred blueberry it will produce a blueberry pancake with a recessive blueberry gene etc.

Initially it was planned that sweet peeps would roam around the house and interact both with the environment and eachother as multiple sweet peeps live in this house unfortunately animation and implimentation cut this short as we were only able to add interaction with one another for example talking, flirting and singing. We also created a board game loosely based on digital game as a fail-safe in case the programmers couldn’t get all the work implemented in time for presentation  this week.

I have provided my Post-Mortem Report for “Sweet Peeps” so that anyone Interested may look into our work and how it turned out or possibly for inspiration on ways to write a post-mortem report. Enjoy!

GDS230.1 Post-Mortem Report

“Sweet Peeps”

Peter Debrincat

109907

 

What Went Right?

The Style

One of the big drawing factors of Sweet Peeps was the visual style, as one of the main parts of the game is observation and seeing your creature move around the world interacting with other creatures, meaning that for the game to be enjoyable the art style would have to be enjoyable. Many peers seemed to be impressed by the style of the game and also the quality of the animations. Although the style of the game is good, it would have been very beneficial if it was created cohesively with what the programmers were working on

The Documentation         

The group began work on the design documentation and art bible for sweet peeps very early on and attempted to update it as often as possible to keep it up to date to where we’re at. Although it may not be the highest quality documentation ever we definitely included as much information as possible and laid it out in the way it seemed to make the most sense to us. All information that was edited and added to the documentation is outlined in the Revision History which acts as a form of version control with the version number of the documentation and the date the event occurred.

The Board game

The board game for Sweet Peeps was a very last minute project that was essentially a backup for the digital game if it was not completed in time. In the end this game ended up being more complete then the final product of the digital game due to being able to be played without any complex programming. This product was able to be achieved by spending a few late nights to make sure all the cards were created and everything was cohesive. The only problem that arises from the board game is we had very little time to test it because of the time restraints explained earlier.

What went wrong?

Communication

To be honest we really tried to communicate with each other effectively by setting up a Slack account for the group but in the end we very rarely used it because not everyone understood how it worked very well. This made things very messy because we had to contact each other using different social media such as Facebook, Skype and Email. For one of our group members we had no Idea how to contact them whilst they are not on the college grounds. In our next project we will need to enforce the use of one global social medium if we wish to succeed in completing a final product. This could even mean spending an entire session going through how to use a program like Slack and the day and time everyone has to view it to make sure everyone is up to date and on the same page. 

Scope

For this project in particular we really over scoped our work which resulted in a working, yet fairly lacklustre final product. We were expecting much more to be included in the game, such as multiple actions, interactions and scenarios that would be dynamic similar to games like animal crossing but we got nowhere near that point unfortunately. We may have subconsciously been in the mindset that we are going to have 12 weeks to complete this, like the previous project but in reality we only had half that amount. I believe that for the next project we will have to imagine something small for the final product that could be done by the 3^rd or 4^th week of production and build upon it or polish it to make sure that it is complete by the deadline. A complete game is a fun game.

Unique Input

We were very happy with our concept of inputting 2 USB devices that automatically booted up the game but unfortunately in the later versions of the Windows operating system they completely removed being able to perform this action because of the issues people caused by abusing the situation. It would have been helpful if we knew earlier that our concept didn’t work but unfortunately it wasn’t exactly possible to change that event.

Conclusion

Although Sweet Peeps had a lot of issues, developing it was still an enjoyable learning experience where I was able to work with some individuals I never have before. One of the highlights of this experience was creating a physical game, because it’s quite rare that we get the chance to or requirement to do so. It would definitely be enjoyable to make a large scale, well-planned out physical game that people can play with their friends. I am definitely proud of what we created in only 6 weeks and I’m glad that we were able to come across so many issues so we can learn from them.