Post Mortem

I set out to make Boomerang Bob the best game I could make at my current level. I am a programmer, and I love making mechanics, I am also very patient and ambitious. I knew this game had to be my main portfolio piece, since it was solo. All the success and failures with the game were from my own doing. I pushed myself to make this the best game of the class and a quality product I could show off. I feel that the game accomplishes this and also represents me. I’m not an artist, but I like to try. I wanted to make all the art for the game to help with the cohesion that I strove for. But what do I mean with cohesion? I hate when things don’t come together. Don’t tell me what the steering wheel does if you haven’t show me the tires. I wanted nothing in my game to be out of left field, if you see it once you should see it again and it should always make sense. For example, the ice penguins, they slow down the player because they represent ice. This should then mean they also freeze and slow down other things too. The game is mostly polished, the final level could use some touch ups, but it’s at a point where no one should find any game breaking bugs. That being said, the game isn’t perfect, and neither am I. There will always be an element of weirdness or glithchyness or “was that intended?” that I like. If the product was perfect, I think that’d be a little boring. And there’s a start and a finish. I always like to make strong finishes in my work, so I knew I had to have a satisfying conclusion. And finally, this game was for me. It was to prove to myself that I could finish it. I would love for people to play it all the way through and tell me they had fun, but if no one does that’s fine, I know what I made and I’m satisfied.

I learned that I still have good ideas, but also not really. I struggled to make some interesting mechanics and then applying them in interesting ways, but I have a few. The game, given its scope and complexity, definitely shows my abilities. But at the same time, it shows my weaknesses. I struggled with level and puzzle designs and many times it made me wish I was better or studied up more. But at the same time every game is unique, and although I can take inspiration from other games, ultimately this game is my own. I also learned to be less stubborn, as I say in my devlogs, I learned to ask YouTube for help quicker. Then again, I also learned that I could code (almost) anything I wanted to.

My design process, as anything else, starts in my head. I don’t like starting anything serious unless I have a good image of it. I have to know how I’m going to make it, where it’s going to go, how I can expand on it and why I’m doing it. I didn’t just think “boomerang game got it,” I have to think about what I can do with this mechanic and how can I apply it in interesting ways. And thanks to a recent purchase of a tablet, I am also sketching out my ideas more. This allowed me to design the enemies quicker. I knew I didn’t want there to be health, that the boomerang can only carry one thing at a time, that enemies shouldn’t be a one shot kill, that the player should mostly carry a battery around, and that the boomerang was the main focus. If it’s called Boomerang Bob that’s because the boomerang is the most important aspect of the game. All of these decisions and more served to compliment the idea that Boomerang Bob is a management game where you use a boomerang more powerful that yourself to move and manipulate the world around you. It attacks, defends, picks up, drops, and it’s your way of interacting with the world I made.

I’m proud that I finished this. This is my first fully complete Unity game and I’m very happy it works from start to end. I’m glad that I kept to my scope, I constantly wanted to work on the game to improve it. Every bug that I squished (and there were many) were a testament to my ability and patience. With so many people in the class stating they aren’t programmers; I wonder if anyone else could’ve succeeded in making this game like I did. I also think the game is mostly well designed. I wanted to have the player understand what to do by presenting them situations with limited options. They would arrive to situations themselves and with very little guidance, apart from the controls in the beginning, just like a big inspiration which was The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.

In terms of problems, this game gave me way too many bugs and puzzle creation proves to be difficult. Level designing is also difficult, from conception to actually making the level. I want to improve my level design skills and I need to work on my naming conventions in my code.

What I would’ve changed is I would seek out help from YouTube sooner, upgrade to the Universal Render Pipeline sooner, and think about cohesion sooner too. I didn’t want enemies to be one shot, and yet the electric bird is. I also made a final powerup that has the boomerang take on the power of the enemies. Because the penguin made me lose so much time, yet the electric bird didn’t, I wish I stuck with the boomerang taking on the powers of a picked up item. So instead of picking up and dropping a penguin, the boomerang would change form to hit the next obstacle with ice. This would’ve saved me a lot of time and effort bug fixing and would fix the inconsistency between the penguin and the electric bird. Other than that, I’m very happy with the game and I think I accomplished the goal I set for myself.