Postmortem Mobile

                                                                Postmortem Mobile 

The start of the project Nepo Society for our mobile game started off slow, with me making a paper prototype so play testers can get a somewhat of a feeling of how our game is going to play out. Everything seemed like it was an understandable game, but the more we looked at it, some rules looked confusing allowing players to semi get the game. The goal was to bring the vision to life not realizing the mobile part plays a big role automatically giving players cards, money, and not having to keep track of how many turns are left. Going into the second sprint I went on to make a character for our game, we were thinking of a small character with a big head.

The making of the player I searched for a video for and it helped a lot leading me towards the final version for the game. The player will be used for each scene and even the home screen, unfortunately we didn’t get to rig but at least we had a model. The next tasks were the rooms where the player will sit in and for transitions when training stats.

The first model was the house, it is shown in the main screen so the player can see what they live in and not guess if they are homeless. Another scene shows the player in a living room making the player think “oh I am in the house that I just saw, it looks nice in here.” 

This scene is when the player hits the play button UI will pop up showing the players of our game this room. The player then goes and practices different stats that they can get higher and higher to get better job opportunities. The stats for the player consists of focus, mind, dexterity, strength, and charisma. The living room scene is there so the scenes aren’t exposed to the players on what scene represents what. One of the stat rooms is the strength scene being a gym.

The scene was not hard to make considering that a youtube video helped alot for this scene making it possible to have for our game. The other stat making the player feel like they are earring the charisma was a ted talk knock off room.

This one was almost giving me trouble making the statue in the middle kept on getting n-gons making the fix for that one singular object taking 30 mins to get the final polished model. The rest was a quick model session. The next scene modeled was the focus scene having the player in a library looking like they are earning the knowledge that they need.

Everything was simple to make, but the two items that I had to look up were the chair and the whiteboard. The white board was a simple model once I saw the video having an easy set up to it. The chair I wanted to have the wheels on because since going to a university wheel chairs are common in a library. The seat and back support needed a soft selection so it looked like the seat was used before the player got there. The hard part of the model was of course the wheels having to make all of them quads and having no n-gons so that the textures can work out. The next scene was the dexterity scene, for us we wanted quickness so I provided a boxing gym to work on hand reflexes and speed.

The members of the team wanted punching bags for the scene making it look like the player is in a session. I didn’t want to have empty space so I added a ring so they can either hit the bag or spar with another nepo ( They don’t actually do it). Again soft selection was used for the bags making them look used and the chains I remembered how to do from a previous class that I have taken. The mind stat boosts all stats when upgraded for the rest of the game, the higher the upgrades the higher the other stats go. No scene was made for it. After everything, with tasks completed going through the last sprints I worked on terrain and sound effects. Having a shop for the player I was asked to get the shop UI in, but not having experience in photoshop my teammate helped a lot showing me how to overcome the challenge and finish the shop UI.

Once the UI was created in unity I had to go in and move anchor points making the cards separate so the screen doesn’t make the text mess up. The images I got off the internet with transparency so they can sit with the background. For the sound I had to download a plug in so I can apply an audio source and make a script for each sound so they don’t overlap with each other. The sounds I got were non copy right so in the future our game doesn’t get taken down for not showing the credit the person deserves. A challenge for me was making the buy image into a button thinking I had to make a button and put it underneath the buy image, but with the help of my programmer it was a quick solution of making the image a sprite button. This allowed me to click the button then I applied the sound making it sync together. I brought in other sounds like a background song that plays so that the player didn’t sit in silence. A video helped me put in the sound in 3 minutes. Now I know what to do if I ever need to apply sound. I added a tapping sound to the buttons but a delay was noticeable in game, so I had to tweak the audio to the best that I could to make the sound happen as soon as the button was pressed. The final thing was the terrain for the homescreen. I wanted to put a HDRI so the scene wasn’t boring, but for unity 6 it was hard to figure out how it was done. I researched and after 20 minutes I found the solution where you had to go into the window settings and apply it from there. 

The terrain was giving me trouble as the github wouldn’t allow poly haven textures because of the files being too big. The solution to the fix was getting pngs off the internet since they aren’t big in file size and I painted it around the terrain. Finishing the project up I wish we took on more of a work load in sprints 4 and 5 because we are not putting enough time for the scope of the game. We barely squeezed the game to the last second which was a win for us, but isn’t a good thing to do. We needed time to polish everything and make sure this game was ready for the world to see. For the future I can’t waste time because that is other people's time and for projects like this time flies and every minute is needed to have a successful project.