#post-morten

[hbarros69]

[nathan3197]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

Pre-production:

We didn’t get enough time to do a lot of planning besides taking apart my asteroids game and stripping it and only keeping the asset (code) that we need for this game.

Production:

For me, I wish the group would have spent more time working on the game itself beside me. but with the short amount of time, I was able to get the core gameplay of the game working and even added support for the switch(even though it is just an android version of the game running on a modded switch) this shows that our game can be run on weaker hardware and mobile hardware. But we couldn’t add everything that was found on the one page. most noticeable more enemy types, an item shop and customisation. These had to be cut. But the current version of the game is polished from a code point of view. 

Post-production:

I wish we had spent more time polishing the assets and replacing the placeholder assets. as a group, we only made menu icons and a boss sprite. All this can be contribute to the short amount of time we had to make this game.

What we can learn next time.

We really should have more time in all areas of production to allow us to create a game that we in vision.

[nathan3197]

Asteroids Post-Morten

Pre-production: I made a concept that i thought it could be possible to make in Gdevelop as i didn’t want to recreate the mistake i made in the first game of making an concept that Gdevelop couldn’t handle. The first thing i wanted to do first was the level design, i did a few drawing of how i wanted the level to be lay out, good thing was i had to worry about and if the player in a zone i can tell Gdevelop what to do. i didn’t spent much time on this as i wanted to get into making the game straight away. But my concept was solid enough to have a start and expand if things go well. 

Production: This stage went quite well more then i expected. i had a few issue but that was cause due to me miss spelling some names, was able to add most of what i wanted to the game beside the dynamic difficulty as that was taking more then 1hr to get working and balancing did add some cool feature to the game by out of curiosity, i wanted to see if destroying a large asteroid would be able to spawn smaller one and first try it work and felt fun destroying multiply of them at the same time.  by the end of this stage i was able to have a game playable from start to finish beside having all the pretty visual. which i will add during post-production  

Post-production: This stage i had some issue getting assets to work, as i had a lot of play space to fill with assets, my main issue was getting all the background object in the right spot and dealing with no hierarchy to manually select object behind another object. This resulted in frustrations but was able to get everything in place with of a method of working backwards. by placing objects that are back of the background like sky, distance tress, grass and etc. and then placing object at the front like bushes, god rays, clouds and etc, so i can move them easily around. What i also did here was adding visual and audio feedback to the player as they need to know when they shot has hit an asteroid or the player has taken damage. I did a lot of self play testing to balance out the weapons, player health, asteroid spawn and etc. Which help out for setting up play testing.   

What went bad:  Nothing really. beside that one issue where i change the player animation to another animation set and cause Gdevelop to crash. was an easy fix of removing the animations.

What went good: Having a simple and not overambition concept to start with help so much when it came to creating the game during production. as i consider the limitation of Gdevelop when designing the game.

What could be change for future project: Don’t spend 15hr working on a prototype. beside that nothing really as i had address the issue i face during making the platformer game.

[nathan3197]

Platformer Post-Morten

Summary:

Pre-production: pre-production went well. Doing the initial concept of a rhythm base platformer with some “basic” platformer mechanics can be achievable in the time frame. During the short time that I was in the pre-production phase I came up with some placeholder assets for platforms, walls and curve walls to help build the level quick. I quickly sketch up a level layout to have a reference during the creation of the level in the production phase. I hadn’t had any issue during this part but looking back over the development I did make a ambitions / difficult mechanics for what GDevelop can do.

Production: I should have spent more time on learning GDevelop to get use to how programming work. as it was very different to standard programming. Production didn’t went so smoothly as I encounter issue with collision with the player and an object like a curved wall or a steep ramp as they needed custom collision to work and one of the main limitation of making custom collision is each point for making the collision can’t be on an angle of above 180° between two points as GDevelop throws an error saying collision will act weird. Once Iv done making custom collision GDevelop was acting very weird when it came to the player walking up a curve wall when the player collision slightly enter another collision the play will continually move up on the Y axis, my theory is that if two collision enter each other, GDevelop will think that the player is stuck and will push it out and make it bounce until the player touches another object. spending around 2hr trying to get around this bug and making the player and the curve wall collision to not collied it wasn’t working and I had to scrap that concept of the game. so went onto making the wall jumping. Making it wasn’t to bad as it work as intended but it was not reliable and had a few bug that I couldn’t get fix in a few hours. So I had to scrap that too. The other major problem I had to tackle is syncing the player movement speed with the Tempo or BPM of the music track that I was going to use for the level. This turn out to not be a big issue as I had the instrumental version of the song with the Metronome and I was able to get a image of the wave/histogram of the audio track so I can visually see if the audio and the player are in sync by seeing the metronome by it line in the audio wave image. After all that, making the level was easy but sadly with the limited time I had left and wasted on fixing bus and dealing with the limitation of GDevelop I couldn’t get much of the level done as I wanted to.

Post-production: During Post-production I was able to remove most of the placeholder asset and replace them with free asset that fix with the theme of the game. Play testing had a lot of feedback that I should have in the play testing session but due to the limited time during production I couldn’t get those in time. But Feedback came down to 3 major things. Visual indicator on timing of jumps that in sync with the music to help create that feeling that you in the rhythm of the music. Reducing the window to recover from making the mistake as this lead to the music being off sync with the level and more things that the player can interact like different enemy type and a attack button. If I had more time to work on this after the play testing I would address the feedback given to me

What went good: syncing up the music with the player movement speed. Honestly though this would be the hardest but turn out to be the easiest. Making place holder asset and a rough 2D sketch of the level help with building the level

What went bad: time management during the production phase and a understanding on the limitations of Gdevelop.

What could be change for future project : better Time management and task management like trello during the production phase and giving more time to learn how Gdevelop programming system work and it limitations.