Assignment 3 Postmortem Reflecting back on the development of Kickback The development of Kickback was this course’s introduction to group work. I was in a team of 4 members (animator, developer, programmer, developer) where we would delegate work and roles to each other and report back on a weekly basis. Kickback during its concept phase was supposed to be a game about navigating 3 different worlds filled with 5 individual levels. These levels would introduce different obstacles and objectives for the player to discover. Looking back at what we produced compared to our initial goal, we only managed 1 out of the 3 worlds that we had desired in the concept phase. We had mapped out our workload (gantt chart) during our first meeting, so why did we fall so hard behind? I believe this was due to two reasons, poor scope and poor communication. Tracy Fullerton talks about this in her book Game design Workshop A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition, p.6,182,435. (extracted above). We were given a time frame of four weeks in which we had to complete our game, during which- we spent most of our production time working during in-class workshop hours. The gantt chart that is displayed in a previous post depicts the workload that our group decided on. The initial idea was that every world would be created on a weekly basis and the last week would be reserved for playtesting. In reality the first two weeks were dedicated towards creating the player and adjusting the fidelity of their movement. Due to poor technological feasibility our workload left us behind our initial scope. However this only played one part of the reasoning, our communication played the second. Communication was fine during our first week of development, however as the workload progressively got more intensive and there were no in-class workshops the designated discord group grew quiet. Even during/after the playtesting period only a few members would respond to messages after a long period of time. At no point in time did I know of the current state of development of Kickback until I would attend a workshop or when the latest build was put up on the google drive. Playtesting was another part of development with limited communication as there were no responses to messages. I had to take it upon myself to conduct all the playtesting and compile all the graphs for the playtesting report without any aid. Out of all our members only one was communicating in this time and able aid in the summary of the report whilst the other two remained unresponsive. The image above of Kickback levels are the unused design ideas for world 2 created in the same week as world 1. World 2 was initially going to introduce enemies and moving platforms to the game. However we were never near the stage to start working on them. If I were to repeat the assignment I think as one of the developers I should have talked with the group about scope initially, at the time it didn’t seem like a large workload as our game was very simple to create. However, with the time it will take to playtest and familiarise ourselves with different technological concepts, the better option would have been to just focus on one world and maybe introduce more level to that if we had the time. In terms of communication I feel like a better scope would have helped, as this was during peak assessment period and we’ve designed a workload that is very intensive, therefore some students may have been evasive as to ignore additional workload. A way I could see us improving would be by designating voice chat calls at certain times of the week, so members are forced to talk and negotiate on what to do next.









