Group Post-mortem

Group Post-mortem

The things that went well in this group project is that we had a very solid idea on what the aesthetic and emotion we were trying to convey through this game we each all knew are strengths and weaknesses and what we were more comfortable doing in this project, We divided the group structure well and the leaders were decided well in the project as the people that wanted to be the leaders got the position and knew the responsibility that came with it, we clearly outlined the assets that were needed for the game in the first couple of weeks and made a really good direct list on everything that needed to be completed in 13 weeks.

We also done very good research behind the game to mimic real world conditions with research into dirt levels and miners and their stories, all asset designs were based off WW1 reference images so we could keep the feel of the game throughout its development and keep within the aesthetic that was decided upon.

I personally made most of the assets and I think I done a really good job in making the assets match the art style and aesthetic of the game as I was lead asset designer I took it upon myself to build all the environment assets in the game so That they all matched in style and I done all the small assets in the first 4 weeks of development which I am very proud of that I fully dedicated my talents into completing 75% of the assets in a short time frame.

We were able to make all the assets on the asset list which is a high achievement because we had up to 375 total assets to be made and implemented.

We were able to make a polished build with moist of the assets implemented into it which is good as most of them I designed and they are needed so the game can have appropriate feed back to the player so they know how to play the game and we made a non-error build.

The things that went wrong in this project is that in the middle of the project the teams communication died through the weeks with no one keeping track of tasks being completed or needed to be done in those weeks, Then we had a problem with the one programmer in which we completely lost contact with him and he was assigned a critical part of the games mechanics.

The characters faces that needed to be made took too long and pushed back on time needed for the animations to be implemented because we had issues with the animations that could have been handle better if we had more time to deal with the implementation of the animations in game and the people assigned to the animation implementation went dark in communication when we needed constant updates on their progress in the final days before e submission.

The implementation of assets was done do late into the project even when they were completed 3 week prior, this put polish further down the line in the timeline which wasn’t good as some well needed polish was needed for this game.

From testing we found out that we had little to no player feedback and left our players lost in what the game was about and how it was supposed to be played this was proved when we tested our prototype in a IGDA meeting and we needed to add more direct player feedback so our players aren’t lost in their objective.

The solutions that we came up with for all the problems we encountered, for the lack of communication with the first programmer we made the smart decision and considered him to have left the project and got are second programmer to take over as the main programmer of our project.

The team’s communication was still low but after our KPI evaluations we all decided we needed to improve on our team communication as a whole and I think we did until the last 2 weeks when communication was needed we sort of lacked it.

For the player feedback being low we added in a tutorial level with voice acting to also have voices telling you how to play the game so that players are less lost in what the game is about.

For the faces situation we I asked for help from a fellow student which gave me a decent shell of a face which I improved upon and that’s what got me through the week and made the faces which took a whole 4 hrs for them to be put into the frames of each animation which now we know not to leave it so late In the development timeline so that the animator will have all the components needed for the character so we don’t have to put one component in each individual frame which was stupid but it had to be done because we didn’t give ourselves enough time to have a better solution in the end everything was made and animations was implemented in the end.

The improvements I would recommend on this project is a clearer timeline and constant communication with our team also more team mates need to be delegated work as a lot of people were either waiting or not doing anything at all for the group project and doing their individual which im not against, im just suggesting that if some more hands were on the project we would have fixed more issues or completed more tasks quickly so that the major issues that happened within the project wouldn’t of happened.