#assignment 3 postmortem

[donnatang]

Assignment 3 Postmortem and Iterations

I did the event part for the Playtesting, our group did 9 playtesting and make notes about the users' actions when they playing the game.

Based on our 1.0 version, playtesting revealed both strengths and issues in the game. Players were confused about power-up functions and unclear game objectives, indicating a need for better guidance and UI cues. However, they found the gameplay challenging and engaging, with strong interest in the story and high replayability. While results suggest experienced players appreciated the narrative more, the small sample size limits broader conclusions. To improve, the game should clarify mechanics, enhance onboarding, and refine visual cues. Despite flaws, the game's strong core concept and narrative appeal provide a solid foundation for future development.

Playtesting of Game Version 1.1 shows improved clarity in game objectives and sustained strengths in challenge and story. However, players still struggle to understand power-up mechanics, all scoring them 3/5, indicating the need for clearer cues or tutorials. Objective clarity slightly improved, with most users rating it 4/5. Gameplay difficulty and narrative replayability remained well-received. Though the sample size was small, feedback suggests minor improvements were effective. Moving forward, the game should focus on better onboarding for new players and clearer communication of power-up functions to enhance the overall player experience.

[n11245191]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

This assignment 3 process has been amazing, to work with a functioning team and understand the full process of using a classic arcade game, and turning it into a fun game for others to enjoy. My team worked exceptionally well together, and helped to create an amazing game in "Rubber Duckie Hero".

My official title for this game was 'designer'. My work consisted of generating ideas for our game, and coming up with interesting challenges, puzzles, and mechanics to make the game more enjoyable.

Other work tasked for me consisted of:

Recording, and editing the video of our game. Here is a link: https://youtu.be/J25BF72KVjU

Designing the shop screen, where I decided to make it a docks area, using the same background as the game, as well as putting the new ships and potential upgrades in bubbles, which would pop when the player purchases it. The player would also be able to see the amount of Rescue Points they have gained so that they know what they can purchase.

I was also tasked to conduct some playtesting of which I have posted about previously.

In the playtesting report, I wrote about our Participant Demographics, and contributed to our teams Discussion of Additions/Changes. Where I would mainly discuss the changes towards the In Hot Water mode that was outlined during our play tests.

Overall, this has been an incredible experience and I definitely look forward to future projects such as this, where hopefully I will be able to spend more time on and implement more amazing games.

[smallnim]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

This post is about my assignment 3 game which was a collaborative development with two of my colleagues - Alex and Luke. The game we developed is called 'Swordsage: Oakwood Adventure' and it is a platformer adventure game. Within this post I will be evaluating the development process and explain the design reasonings behind the game respective to my contributions. In addition to this, I will be referencing segments of Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition (Fullerton, 2018) to explain my design reasonings.

Of the three of us who worked on 'Swordsage', I was responsible for level designing. Taking into account that I would be level designing, I had to position myself in the perspective of the players, taking on a playcentric design process and having thoughts such as "what do players generally find engaging in platformers" or "what aspects generally draw players' attention within adventure games". I had to take on these thoughts to draw out ideas that would give players the ideal experience. Through this process, I was able to think of ways to utilise the provided sprites and assets to develop a tutorial level that would give players insight into the possibilities the game had as an adventure platformer. This resulted in the usage of several jump mechanics and traversal techniques, allowing players to challenge themselves by thinking about how they will tackle challenges moving forward in the game. In addition to this, to add more challenge to the game, monsters would be placed appropriately around the map, giving players new obstacles to take on rather than just the platforms.

In addition to this, the game also utilised formal elements, specifically rules, resources, and conflict. These elements were utilised to shape the boundaries and fundamentals of the game. Through having rules such as void boundaries and different interaction outcomes, players would not be limited, but rather led on the right path to explore the game as designed to be, allowing players to experience the game without having conflicting thoughts such as becoming confused or bored as they are guided towards the right path. For resources, the game utilised a health feature, this was developed to give players a value to their health, invoking the need for players to think about how they will handle situations given that they will be reset upon losing all their hearts. In addition to this, to counter-balance the fact that players lose a portion of their health per interaction with monsters, features such as healing statues were implemented to restore the player's health value. As for the conflict elements within the game, players are challenged to progress through a series of platforms at their own pace while taking on monsters along the way.

Now moving forward, I will go on to reflect about the end results of the game's development.

The results of the game came out rather well. People who helped playtest the game were rather happy with its state and gave positive feedback, claiming that the level design was aesthetic, the game was fun, and that the game was easy to get used to. On another note however, there were still feedback that showed discontentment with the game, and in all honesty, that is to be expected and accepted. The current state of the game is incomplete, however, this was due to the inability to find and include more sprites within the game, limiting the development team from improving the overall player experience. In addition to this, GDevelop was also insufficient in the sense that it limited us as developers from being able to run the game smoothly when implementing new features such as special effects to add a more lively feel to the environment.

Overall though, this assignment has contributed majorly to my experience as a game developer in learning as I have learnt multiple things not just from the workshops and the book, but also my colleagues.

Following this section of text will be screenshots and a video demonstrating the current state of the game.

Screenshots of Code:

Screenshot of Level Design:

Video of Gameplay:

(my own recording - was also used for the report document)

Reference:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Forth Edition (4th ed.). CRC Press LLC.

[lilymakesgames]

Assignment 3: Postmortem

We made it! Huge thanks to everyone in my team, it was wonderful working with you all and I'm so grateful that we could bring Rubber Duckie Hero to life together! It was such a rewarding process to birth the initial ideas but then collaborative build the vision as reflected by the iterated one-page document seen below.

Before I discuss changes, I'd like to add this graphic that depicts all of RDH's implemented features for the final prototype.

One thing I'd change about the prototype development process...

It would've been nice to also have a hand in the programming. GDevelop and source control do not go hand-in-hand. To avoid complications, everyone agreed that it would be best for one person to develop the game on behalf of the team. This duty fell to Ann who did an amazing job, huge thanks to you for being incredible! The rest of us worked on art and design iterations and Ann was also exempt from writing the report to balance the workloads, although everyone still facilitated playtesting sessions. But, I digress.

If I could go back, I would've attempted to explore alternative solutions for source control and discussed it more with the team. Although everyone had conflicting schedules, we perhaps could have tried harder to come to a more collaborative approach to programming. In the end, we settled for ensuring that Ann always had our help if she needed it and to consider her workload in respect to the scope. A team of 4 might have crazy ideas but a single developer can only actualize so much of that vision--maybe we could have done more if we split the programming more evenly.

One thing I'd change about the design...

I would have included powerups and more interesting upgrades. The team devised some excellent ideas such as a purchasable companion that would fly out and collect ducks for you every 5 seconds. The novelty of such ideas would have elevated the experience. Other than that, I am very happy with what has been designed and implemented.

Thanks for reading!

End of post.

[dogedouge]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

First of all, for the team, I think the division of labor in our team is very chaotic, and the time management ability is also very poor. There were even behaviors that some people didn't want to do before (he did it later).

We also encountered a lot of problems during development, for example: our main game project file is in the artist's computer, because Gdevelop can't share it, we can't create new programs at will (only screenshots can be found on google document). As a result, our game levels can only be built by our art. (Actually it should be the work of the designer, that is, me) In addition, because we did not start our project immediately, our development time was very tight later.

For the evaluation of this game, I think our game is very rubbish. This may indeed be considered a general quality for a student, but for my personal standards, I think it is a rubbish, and I will never play it a second time. . I have to be serious about my games because I don't think I can double-standard between other people's games and the games I make

[combatandcoding]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

We managed to get 6 people to play our game which was a fair effort. Overall the from the player surveys and spoken feedback people really loved playing our game. The big positives were that people loved the pace and the art style of the game, they thought it was simple to learn and hard to master which was exactly what we were going for. The main negatives were the hitboxes could at times be a bit off which is a perfectly reasonable critique and that sometimes the enemies spawn on top of you which is completely fair. I think if we continued to work on this game (we are seriously considering it) with a few minor adjustments we could really make a fun game that harkens back to the old flash days. The final title for the game is 'Drill Till Still' which I think is catchy enough.

I am so happy with how the game turned out. If you had told me by the end of this unit we would have a playable prototype of a game that almost everyone who play tested it enjoyed I wouldn't have believed you. We told play testers that 10 minutes was the amount of time we would like them to play it for, almost every play tester played for 15 minutes and tried to beat their last score and we had one person (who was not in our class) like it so much they played for close to 45 minutes. That to me told me that we have a game is either enjoyable or at least addictive to play. Play testers kept mentioning that "I can't believe you managed to make a game like this in a few weeks" which was a huge pat on the back and people scored the art style of the game quite high on the player surveys in order of what you liked about the game so the from scratch pixel assets did not go unnoticed which was really rewarding to hear.

All in all I have had a blast making this game, this unit has been so interesting and fun and I was blessed to be part of a games dev team that ran like a well oiled machine so thank you to Will, Kelvin and James, this project has been the most hassle-free and fun group project I have completed in my uni career so far and I think it's in big part to you blokes so cheers you absolute legends! Thank you to everyone who play tested Drill Till Still and I am hoping we can maybe tinker it some more (sort out the enemy spawning system) and add some more levels at some time in the future! Thanks for reading my development blog. I attached an image below of the game in it’s final iteration and all it’s glory!

GG!

[harrisonigb220]

Week 13 - Assignment 3 Postmortem

Welcome back to a very special and final GDevelop-ment blog. This week I will be discussing my thoughts on Asteroid Field Escape, some feedback we got since last time, the things I liked, and where I would see the game going if development was continued.

Further Feedback

Last time I was discussing how we tested three different individuals within our class and the difficulty was too high which made it very hard to get conclusive feedback on our features. Well, it turns out the changes we made to the screen size, and movement speed paid off as almost everyone was able to complete the game and enjoy the features.

The powerup was one of the standout features for our playtester as they enjoyed being able to become the ship that they destroyed. There was some misunderstanding on how they acquired the powerup in the first level but by the second they understood what was occurring.

The boss fight was also a hit with it leaving the playtesting session on a high note with the difficulty being a good balance, with most playtesters surviving on very minimal life.

The Good

While not being my initial project, there are many things I really enjoyed and believe turned out very well.

The amount of enemies and range of different enemies added quite a bit of variety for the player, not only to fight and overcome, but also to play as.

Movement was something that also grew on me quite a bit, albeit had mixed reactions from playtesting, I felt like the weight of the ship and drag felt like you were in space unlike plenty of other games which have such precise movement that it doesn't feel like zero gravity.

Finally, the boss level. I absolutely love this level, and the use of the edge mechanic which the player could use to their advantage now being flipped and the boss is the one using it to add difficulty. If we had more development time I would have loved to create more bosses as hard but fair challenges for the player to overcome.

The Potential

If I was to continue developing the game there are several additions I would include into the game, and some changes I would make:

1. Add in a Beastiary which would allow the player to see how many pirates they have defeated, and once defeating so many they would unlock the ability to star the level as that ship.

2. Adding in proper fullscreen support

3. Adding more levels, bosses and enemies

4. More indepth cutscenes that feel like an addition rather than an after thought

5. More unique sprites

With these additions and changes I believe the game would be extremely fun and improve off what already makes the game enjoyable in its current form.

Finale

Well, it has been a long journey and I'm grateful for everyone that has been following my development blog as I've learned my own lessons in Game Development and how to develop a prototype for a game as a team.

Live long and propser!

[skye-wang-blog]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

The assignment 3 mainly consisted of the game part and game testing. Designing the game and developing the game in the early stage was the difficult part. In the process of developing the game, we encountered many areas and difficulties that we did not understand, so we consulted a lot of information and instructional videos to help us make the game better. Once the game was finished we needed to check for bugs and refine the game, then the most important step was to find the right person to be a game tester to test the game and fill in feedback forms and analysis to check over the final game. During this assignment I learnt a lot about developing games and what aspects of the game need to be tested.