Studio 3 post mortem

Studio 3 has been an enjoyable unit, it was split into 2 separate projects. These projects were:

• East inland trading co. - was the first project for this trimester taking up 8 weeks which was a considerable amount of time more than the 2nd project. It’s a game where you control a land ship where you can fire a cannonball attached to a chain that can be reeled in by left-clicking your mouse repeatedly. You can deploy Fulton balloons that lift off pieces of land and are sold to give the player currency. After missions that currency can be used to purchase certain upgrades. You are handed a series of 3 envelopes that contain 3 different missions for each faction, those 3 factions were The Clergy, the Venetians and the colonial government. The missions force you to either destroy certain buildings and a certain quantity of them or steal certain kinds of land. It’s been a fair while since we worked on this project so I’m a little bit rusty on the details. But from what I remember not too much went right for project, but also not too much went wrong.

• Plantagonist was the 2nd and final Project for the trimester taking up a total of 5 weeks which was considerably less time than the first project. Plantagonist is a game where you play as a living sunflower that has dived into an ant hill after some mischievous ants have stolen your little sunflower seeds. The flower hangs upside down from its stem as if a long rope and the player uses a trackball mouse to swing from side to side by swinging the trackball and moving the base of the flower’s stem by left clicking and right. The objective of the game is to collect the seeds to gain score and avoid ants and aphids that deal damage to your character. There are also objects that weigh your character down once you collect them, making it more difficult to swing. The player constantly descends through the ant hill and is unable to return to the surface once the game commences.

East inland trading co

What went right?

• GUI – there was a lot of intensive planning for how the GUI for the game would work and a lot of the focus for the designers in our group was put into it. 3 of us focused on creating the artwork on the GUI and how it operated but there ended up being a lot of talk about how things are going with it.  Although it turned out very well it could have been time that we spent elsewhere that could have been more beneficial to the project.

• The mechanics- a fair few of the mechanics of the game were implemented and it provided a moderately fun experience. In the end we didn’t end up getting every mechanic planned into the game because we were continually coming up with more ideas when we really shouldn’t have been but was implemented was enough to make the game enjoyable.

What went wrong?

• Communication between programmers and designers-Unfortunately there was a bit of distance between the programmers and designers because we were working in a much larger group than we have previously during our studies. So this took a bit of time to get used to. The relationship we had for this project was that the designers provided the concepts and assets and implement them when really everyone should have chipped into putting the game together in the engine.

• Time management- Our time wasn’t managed very well throughout the project and it often left us a little confused as to what was required of us at certain points because of it. We were still implementing mechanics close to the deadline of the project meaning we essentially got very little polish into the game when it became time to submit, the game looked very good but there was almost no feedback.

Plantagonist

What went right?

• Communication improved- at the beginning of the project we were still a bit confused about how to operate as a large team but this straightened out early on and we were required to insure that whenever the designers had a meeting, a programmer had to be present to make sure that those ideas were viable in the time we have.

• GUI- similar to the previous project, a lot of focus was put into the GUI but thankfully not enough to set the game back too far. We planned out how the menu would function fairly early on so that we would have a clear idea of what is required of the menu both aesthetically and functionally and in the end GUI worked out exactly as expected

• Polish – The game had a lot more polish than the previous project and we were able to incorporate visual feedback for the vital things that feedback would be required for. For example, the main character colliding with something bad would convey that something bad happened through the use of certain particle effects and camera shakes.

What went wrong?

• No collisions with walls- one of the major annoyances of the game is that the main character could not collide with the wall. Unfortunately the programmers had other work to attend to and this left the designers unable to understand how the collisions worked through their coding. I’m not sure if this could have been prevented as we didn’t have much time at all, so we were pretty much unable to research how the code the programmers’ code functioned.

• Exhibition- a week before handing in the final product we were required to show off our game at a student exhibition, but unfortunately we had a few issues with that. There were slides from the opening cut scene missing, there was no feedback so players didn’t understand what was going on and the collision box for the main character was way too big.

Conclusion

In the end both projects had their benefits and issues and I learnt a lot about working in a larger group than 2-5 people. I think one of the major issues I had during this trimester was the fact that I had a few too many things going on that may have set me back further then I would have liked.  I had to balance Work, Study and my personal life all at once which definitely meant that some of my time that should have been dedicated to study was spent at work. Next trimester I plan to dedicate to my final trimester of study at  this college full time to make sure that I provide as much benefit to the team as I possibly can.