Post launch reflection: Goodest Boi
1: What aspect did I enjoy working on the most and what was it about that aspect that I enjoyed?
I thoroughly enjoyed learning. For this game: my goal was to try new things, so I challenged myself to grab every opportunity. I wanted to learn to
Use audio in Unity; so that was my main role in Goodest Boi.
Lift my C# coding; so I made myself open the script editor and experiment.
Internalise what I learn; so I what I learned on Goodest Boi I used in at home in my Min’atoa game.
Try new programmes and plugins for the first time; such as Audition and Audacity, ProBuilder, Scene Fusion, OBS, and TextMesh Pro.
Build social media profile through devlogs on various platforms for the first time.
Tbh I most enjoyed the art, even though I had no art role in this game; so I found it a bit frustrating to sit on the sidelines. Whatever I did, I quickly added texture, colour and decorative assets. My prototype Probuilder whiteboxes were all coloured and decorated. For me adding ambience made it a lot more fun to test gameplay. I was pleased to mock up the game to a playtestable state in less than a day, and looking quite cool. I loved putting my own art touches on the UI, trying to make it tasteful in layout and palette, and match the rest of the art style. Art is in itself pleasurable.
In contrast, I found the coding frustrating for long periods, then immensely satisfying when I got it to work. Coding has lower lows but higher highs, and is more like solving a puzzle, which I enjoy, but in a different way - it uses a completely different part of my brain. Coding is more ‘behind the scenes’. Its satisfying to get it working well for the player, and a player who knows what they are looking for will notice it, but it is less immediately apparent than the art and harder to blog about visually.
2: What might I do to continue getting better at what I enjoyed?
I’ll keep leaping into new programmes, watching tutorials and trying new things, because most of the things I tried were quickly gratifying. It’s a matter of reminding myself I can do it, even if it doesn’t seem so at first.
I’ll keep opening up Visual Studio and trying out different things in scripting; daily practice will give results. Again, it helps to tell myself I can do this, it will just take time and effort. There are a lot of people out there to learn from and heaps of code and tutorials online..
Because I’ll keep decorating whatever I do, I will make a point of learning about colour palettes, graphic design, Photoshop and Illustrator. Get over myself and draw with the tablet, eventually it will get as good as my pen and paint..
Another step is to improve the assets I make for my devlogs. I haven’t made gifs, and gifs attract the eye and can explain things really well.
3: What did and didn't pan out how I thought it would. What might I do to address this in future projects?
The team didn’t use version control for this project. Next time I would communicate how we could effectively operate version control. I like really appreciate the functionality of GitKraken. Agreeing checks and balances and operating practices would give the team confidence that it would work without losing or overwriting work.
We lost time when the Master version was not in the shared folder and the team member was absent;, it doubled up work to get something working in a different version then transfer it across via prefabs or assets.
We used Agile processes initially, using Trello and sprints, but that fell away later. Having a strong, decisive product manager was highly effective for product quality, and team productivity. We had definite standards and goals to work to. On the other hand for me at least it was demotivating to be excluded from the decision making, and sometimes I had spare resource that wasn’t being used.
We mostly worked on our own allotted tasks, and brought them all together near the end. I pushed to bring the various pieces together earlier to ensure we were all on the same page, and that helped my own work a lot.
The prototyping was excellent for the audio at least. The initial maze I built, very simple on paper, when walking through it, was way too complex. The simple game layout surprisingly, was enough. The prototypes enabled quite a bit of testing and improvement.
