Blog PostMortem

Blog Postmortem

In the development process of the prototype game Soar, I started looking at the document of the lead designer and started making user stories to assign tasks to group members. Once all tasks were assigned for the first ever sprint the group and I were ready to take on the challenge. The first task was the level design for me so I’ll check in with the lead designer to make sure that the level sees the vision that he was seeing. When completed the first time the lead designer wasn’t happy about it, so how it would be at an actual company the producer would see it and send the work back to me. I started working based on the idea of the lead of building the level off a cubes size in the world of unity. I completed levels 1-5 and met with the lead and he liked it way better than the first ever one. Me and the designer agreed to make the 5 levels into one making a map where players will enter different levels during gameplay all in one go. We decided this to make the gameplay feel smooth and not have any scene changes. A big problem we had and recently fixed in Sprint 4 and 5 was that the colliders weren’t working so the solution was to put another collider on the player and the walls. This solution fixed all issues we were having and made each level playable during gameplay instead of phasing through some of the walls.



The next big task for myself was providing the UI into the prototype to make it feel like more of a game and not have players just load directly to the game when hitting play. So I first created the Main Menu having the simple buttons of play, quit, and controls. We wanted the players to see how the game operated before they went in to try on their own.

Like every menu the buttons will direct the player on click to what button they press, so the game has achieved its first menu. The controls menu had old controls we had assigned a tapping of the WASD to move, stop, and hover in game. This was something that wasn’t liked by playtesters and during watching the players test the game, they struggled heavily making the end of the tapping mechanic and going to just holding down the buttons for movement. The tapping made players wonder if the game was even playable thinking it was a bug that needed a fix. The Soar team saw this and it felt like an immediate change had to happen. Players will tap to go forward but get cancelled out by another control so the player will just sit in place and wouldn’t move. This is why playtesting was important and if playtesting wasn’t done then the game would’ve failed badly, after the lead wanted a new addition of a control for the game, it being the mouse allowing the player to look around while flying to enjoy the view while trying to beat the game. So for one of our sprints we had that assigned to our programmer and he was able to complete it, and also changed the S key to stop the players momentum so they can maneuver to try and get more energy to stay flying.





With the controls being done I made a winning condition with a game over screen to have players challenge themselves on completing the game without dying and restarting. So I made the gameover script and attached it to the floor so whenever the player hits the ground the player will be met with death. It worked right off the bat with no bugs or issues so the next task was the game winning scene. Everybody loves to win in games so I provided a wall so once a player hits it at the end they will change to the win scene. The lead decided it would be better to make it a certain distance instead of the wall and I agreed with that change so we did it.




During other playtests players had no idea what the stormlight(energy) did and were wondering why they kept dying and not knowing what the blue meter was top left of screen. On one playtest a player thought collecting the blue orbs would win them the game. We had a problem on our hands with players not knowing what some UI was and what the stormlight orbs in game did. So the solution to that was to add a goals tab in the main menu. The goals tab will provide image and details on what the orb was and bar with some info on winning the game.





Finishing up and polishing the game if I could go back with the knowledge that I have now I would be more prepared as a producer. Knowing a little more about the producer role I would have everything scheduled for each sprint and who takes on the tasks instead of the day before or day off. Another thing is getting the movement mechanic early to test the map and figure out the issues early instead of later. It's a learning experience so the information learned from my mistakes would definitely change everything from day one. Another thing that I would’ve done was attempt more tasks after finishing tasks assigned for the sprint instead of trying to find art for the game even though it was not needed because again it's supposed to be a prototype.