Postmortem

Success:

Throughout the process of creating the game my group and I faced many successes. We were able to communicate well with one another through the group chat we created on discord and we were also able to distribute our roles properly. Although everyone worked on different things at once we made sure that everything came together in our game and that our work meshed well together. We were able to use github properly to share our code and level designs with each other and help each other out with the bugs we faced throughout the process. Another success we had was creating a nice flow to our story once we had the main idea down for how we wanted things to go throughout. We also had success in creating nice simple puzzles in our games that people had a lot of fun playing and gave us really positive feedback on. We also created fun new ways to interact with our game such as a clickable manhole cover scattered throughout the game that allowed you to gain hints on how to learn more about yourself and also learn more about how to complete the puzzles in front of you. 

Challenges:

While we had our successes within the game we also had our challenges. One big issue we had in the beginning was choosing an asset that wasn’t too big to work with. Our asset we initially downloaded was way too big for github and it took a lot of time to upload our files. So we had to go back into the files and delete any unnecessary files that weren’t being used or that we deemed to not be helpful. Through the prototype and beta we didn’t also really have a story to go with our game. The game just felt like you were just collecting keys but there wasn’t a real reason as to why we did that. We just knew we wanted to do something similar to an escape room. Through group discussions we were able to fix this problem and create a nice funny story to our game that gave purpose to everything that we had going on. Another challenge we faced was the intuitivity of the game. A lot of our puzzles were simple but had players confused as we didn’t give instructions as to how they should complete the puzzle. We also didn’t continue with our manhole cover hint giving theme at first which had people confused in the beta testing as they were looking for such an item to help them throughout the game. Also in some instances we had used the F key for players to interact with objects and in others the Right click. This also had players very confused so we decided to make it all one key and made our game more intuitive and concise. 

Lessons Learned:

We learned a lot about story building and how to build a nice flowing story through game design. We also learned how to work with rotating cameras, object interactions, working with light, and also building upon level design. We also learned how easy things are once you actually have a theme and story developed for your game because it makes creating the components of the game that much easier. 

Future Iterations:

For the future we want to create more complex puzzles that build upon our story more and fit the theme of the character you find yourself to actually be. We also want to bring in more assets to build upon the aesthetic of our game and also build our story. Lastly we also want to learn more about the point light and how to add more aesthetics to our game through lighting and make the game more interactive through it as well.