Postmortem

PostMortem:

What we changed from the initial plan was that we switched away from a 3d game to a 2d game and the fantasy part really changed, and it became more of something else as we switched away from the fantasy tile map. That was something that was a challenge to switch to quickly from a 3D framework to a 2D framework. What went right with the final project would be the style and having it match which was nice. The building on WEBGL went smoothly as well and didn't cause any issues either which was a plus when it was uploaded onto itch.io. What went wrong with the project would be the version control and having to constantly pull from main and another issue would be just time management with other classes hindering us in being able to finish the game. Another issue would be communication and having all of us on the same page which is hard with larger groups and being unfamiliar with others. Had we set up more in person meetings or meetings on discord, it would have allowed for better communication as well. There were also issues with contributions and two of the team members not contributing or communicating which was a large issue which affected the quality of the project and what we could put out. 

For doing something different, we would probably do the version control differently and have it so that you would pull from main, make your changes, and then merge the branch.  After you merge, just remove the branch in order to follow more standard practices with version control. Another thing would be to have more meetings to discuss the project and have tracks along to be more structured. If we had more time, we would just flesh out the game more to not just meet the requirements and to have interesting quests as well as better mechanics for the summoning/attacking along with the UI on the screen that was put on hastily. 

Elton:

To add onto the paragraphs on top, I felt like I couldn’t focus too much on this class due to having three project based classes at the same time. However, I still felt like I should have contributed more towards the project and not just crunched because it felt like it was the only time slot that I had. Any type of meeting outside of just texting would have been helpful and maybe including the chance to have sections for CMPM125 would also be something to look into. People could start forming groups for the team projects during the beginning or towards the middle of the week which would be extremely helpful in streamlining the process of group work. I think what I learned from this project was to be less lax about meeting with the team and I would definitely follow something more structured like I have in other classes with large group projects. Having set meeting times would help a lot in getting the deadlines in and being more focused on other classes caused this one to be more sidelined which drastically affected the quality of the project. It was just made to meet the requirements when it should have been a portfolio piece that I should be proud of. 

Trying to meet requirements resulted in me having to make last minute changes as discussed in Joceyln’s part due to me feeling that the game over screen should have been a scene change and if we had more time to say that, then we could have gone to a better understanding instead. We could have worked more on trying to get a consensus of what the game would be like and get everyone on the same page. I also spent too much time thinking that we were still in fantasy and I set up auto tiling rules for the overworld as well as collisions for the water and trees. 

Here is a tiny snippet of it where it had rules and random plants/brushes for it: 

Water autotiling: 

Due to the time constraint, I couldn’t do more of this fantasy theme and we had to switch instead. This resulted in the autotiling being removed as well as the collisions which I should have included as well. I couldn’t as I was more focused on the requirements and making it work instead of having a game that was fun and enjoyable for others. If I had another week, I would also spend less time on certain features such as the tilemap and focus more on the mechanics instead of the graphics. I would then add more quests, have set animations for the npcs, maybe change the tileset and port it over to be more fantasy-like, and also have the summons be able to chase the enemies and attack them more on their own. The menus would be more standardized and have more features on top of them too instead of having basically an empty UI. There would be more work put into place and I would make the project more structured when working with a team next time. 

Jocelyn Yu :: 

Definitely, we as a team had several setbacks and shortcomings. Since all of us only communicated via Discord, I felt the limitations in communication and collaboration. If we had any chance to meet in person, I believe that we would have developed a more enhanced, flashy game. Open-ended discussions would have occurred more if we had met in person as well. Additionally, since we ultimately decided to switch from Unity3D to Unity 2D game, I found myself having to get myself used to the 2D render pipeline, so that exemplifies one of the challenges I faced in the group project. Thankfully, I pulled through and found out over time that 2D is sort of similar to the 3D render pipeline in Unity. 

Actually, it is my first time collaborating and working with a “shared” Unity project, so as an initial thought, I felt anxious and thought: Would I accidentally delete someone’s work? Would I accidentally mess up a scene in our group project? Would I have conflicts with someone else’s file? Would that conflict also ruin the things one of my team members is implementing right now? Fortunately, I learned that such cases would not happen as long as I worked and stayed on my own branch. 

In this group project, I worked on the Game UIs like the pause menu and game over menu. However, right at the night before the game project was due, we had a bug which destroyed my game UIs (especially with the Game Over menu I created). So, Elton had to redo the menu, which did not look like the original menu I designed. Initially, my game over menu looked like this:

But with Elton’s last minute implementation, the game over menu resulted in looking like this: 

Among the things we have developed in our group project, I wish for my team to continue committing to our 3D game because personally, I feel that 3D games tend to look more flashy and realistic. So, this is something that I wish to change overall. 

One complication I faced was that this project was due right around the day where the juice module was due, as well as my rough draft for EDUC60 and a group project for CMPM176. As a result, I had to ask for extensions for my rough draft assignment, which my TA and professor for EDUC60 were nice enough to give me. Ultimately, I felt that all of my assignments and projects were piling up right at the 9th and 10th week of the quarter. Thankfully, I managed to get everything done in the span of these two weeks~!