Week 8 - Game Showcase and Feedback

Hey everyone, Ricardo here!

This last week was the last one available for us before having to showcase our game at MOJO, a game showcase event organized by our university. Suffice it to say, it was pretty intense. Not demoralizing or boring at all, but the amount of work was just astounding. Even after cutting essentially 2/3 of our game as recommended by our teachers, we still had our hands full up until the last minutes. While working under pressure is something very draining to me and I still have to find and enforce work/personal life balance, it was a very fun week, and it was rewarding to witness our game in action and show it to other players.

Our game showcase event's main point is not only to, well, showcase our game: we took some feedback, both in-game through some collected metrics, visually through gameplay, and asked our participants. What we gathered from all these sourcesin a nutshell is that this prototype is a good start: there's polish missing here and there, but regarding basics such as player controller, level design, difficulty, and pacing, we received good feedback regarding it.

The most important opinion we wanted to gather is about our unique narrative idea for the game. And I'm happy to confirm this was indeed unique and fun from our player's opinions. At the end of the day, that's what matters: we are competing with every Metroidvania when it comes to level, enemy, boss, and world design, but our narrative dynamic is very different and unique. We truly confirmed it's a unique selling point and a major driving factor in our game.

With the grunt of the work having to be completed and shown this Monday, this week was very... empty. Most work so far has been on this topic indeed: gathering the collected feedback, drawing conclusions, and preparing a report with all that information. So, as a devlog for this week, there's very little I can offer.

So, considering this is the last devlog for the course, I'll instead share some personal opinions and thoughts regarding this 8-week journey:

• Being mainly a programmer up to this point and working on many non-game-related projects, focusing on a project that's more artistic is a nice change of pace for me. I'm still not sure if I intend to pursue 100% gamedev, or do something more "graphics engine" related. Regardless, this was a very cool project to develop and has helped me figure out better how's like to work entirely at game development.
• I got to try a few different skills! I'm essentially a programmer, having very few artistic skills, but I wanted to push myself in that area in some way.  Initially, I was thinking of helping with any art required but didn't pursue it as I couldn't match the current work's quality and didn't have time to practice it. However, I dabbled in animation for some characters. I animated the wolf and witch battle scenes, requiring a lot of different poses and movements, and overall was quite fun!
• One thing we should have done better as a team was write down all details explicitly in our design document. Ideas settled in meetings or talked about are quickly forgotten and/or misinterpreted. I've felt I took many assumptions that were later broken because of settled discussions that I didn't recall.
• Unity has its quirks, but I got more experience developing games on it after this project. I've felt some of those were just me being inexperienced with it, but after talking with some experienced colleagues, it's not just me. While I still believe I've yet to learn properly how to use Unity in some areas (especially animation), I'm now more aware that there's no "one engine to rule them all", and better appreciate alternatives.

That's it for me! Regarding the future of the project, we're still not sure whether we will dedicate more time to advance it forward. Doing so would require more serious planning and dedication, which we likely won't have in the near future. Regardless, if this is an idea you enjoyed, let us know!