Postmortem

1. Successes

We have a complete gameplay loop in which the player grows by collecting more weapons and extensions (weapon power-ups), and the player is able to choose their favorite weapon and set up their own ones.

1. Challenges

Implementing a generic interface for the weapon system (and also the inventory) can be a challenging task, especially when you want to have multiple types of weapons, and allow each type of weapon to have an arbitrary number of extensions, and have them work altogether without bugs.

Collaboration on Github for Unity was kind of hard to get started with. It is not uncommon to have people accidentally working on the same scene and end up having to redo everything, or to have some merge conflict on the same file. It also took us a while to correctly sync the project on everyone’s device.

1. What we’ve learned

During the game development process, we learned how important it is to tutorialize your game as if you were the player. While players were testing our Beta, overall the players were excited to utilize all the functions, but not all of these abilities were explained well through gameplay. This allowed us to edit our tutorial level in a way that was easy for the player to understand and learn. That being said, because of the variety of abilities and a smooth difficulty curve, these players were eager to play the finished product. We found that when players have different skills to learn and levels that allow them to improve on their use of these abilities, it retains more attention and interest. Finally, we learned that an interesting story, combined with the mood exuded through the environment and music is also an important factor in game development. Because there are brightly lit characters, background, and upbeat music, although there are some moments of battle which are not always calm, it still maintains an overall happy and pleasant mood.

1. Future Improvements

During our planning phase, we had an idea to give our game a roguelike aspect where levels would be randomized every run. We were only able to have five levels and so we could potentially add more. The look of the levels are essentially the same throughout the game with the exception of a background change. Variety can definitely be added since a jungle setting can vary drastically depending on the time of day  or where you are. As of right now, abilities are pretty simple and have no special effects. Some improvements can include more complex abilities and special effects when you activate one. Finally, most enemies just follow you around and you take damage when you collide with them. A potential improvement would be to make the ai more complex and to have different attack patterns (maybe ranged or jump attacks).