Short Giraffe Post Mortem

This semester has been such a fun ride. From joining the team to scaling up to thirteen people to the senior show and getting interviewed afterwards. It’s hard to believe it’s all really done. I guess “done” is subjective though since we still have to get the game onto Steam. That being said with the main development period being done on the game here are my thoughts on how it all went.

The Good

A few of my key decisions really paid dividends during the project like my decision to base our puzzle architecture around Unity’s Event system. This made diagnosing puzzle issues simple and this made building out puzzles incredibly quick and easy to do. This enabled us to create more content then any senior game in the history of the game program. Our game creates a unique challenge for the player in over 20 levels. The rail system ended up being a key system that proved to be very useful over the course of production. This rail system allows objects to move upon a predefined rail and ended up being the foundational system for our bosses, as well as other special events in our game. It even shows up in some of our puzzles. I’m happy that our team tried to go for the Nintendo Switch and while I’m sad it didn’t work out I’m glad we are publishing on Steam instead. Overall I think the team cohesion went pretty well, I was able to spearhead a few of my own features like the jet pack and bosses. I also was able to estimate my hours better then before.

The Bad

While this project was by and large a very pleasant production cycle, I thought that there were some things that could have gone better on my end. I think communication on my end could have been improved. I need to continue working on trying to get my point across more concisely. I wish I was able to spend more time then I did on the bosses. They went through a lot of iteration but I regret not trying to prototype additional boss ideas before we completely settled on the chase sequences. Overall I think they turned out nicely albeit a bit buggier then I would like still.

What I Learned

During the course of this project, hindsight is 20/20. While my best decision on this project was to use the Unity event system for the basis of the puzzle systems, I wish I went one step further and made pre-built puzzle sets to make level creation even more efficient. While linking puzzle elements together takes very little time, all those little times add up and the majority of our puzzles probably could have been made from say various small puzzle “kits” with all of the puzzle elements linked up together already and they all just work. This would keep the system modular while also making the process more time consuming initially but more convenient later on in the production as changes from a kit in one level could easily be made the default for that same kit in all of the levels. This essentially would allow the level designers to help assist me more in building out levels as all they would have to do is position those kit items rather then having to even link anything up. This is I think was the most valuable technical lesson I learned from this project is whenever you can go to the next step in efficiency for the purposes of scale, it probably will help you more later on in the end.

Coming to a Close

I want to thank the rest of my team for this great experience and for a game I am happy I can say I helped develop and release. While it’s not totally the end for the project and there is still work to do on it, It shaped up to be a great 1.0 release. Thank you to to all of my profesors and the rest of the Champlain Game Studio for helping me get to this point!