Quick note: Blogger won't let me upload images for some reason, so I cannot show my work in this postmortem. It gives me an error no matter how long I let the image upload, so I've decided to focus on the text.
Over the course of developing Landscaping Madness, there were many things I would have changed. I enjoyed our final creation, and would be proud to show it off. But there was a lot of different ideas and functions that were never implemented into the game. And I feel as though Landscaping Madness doesn't reflect the best work I can truly achieve. I am more proud of the game than most of the games I've created thus far, and yet I feel as though it is a failure.
Let's start from the beginning. For the first time, I was the project lead instead of the level designer. I've never been a true project lead, and I haven't had the responsibility that goes with it in quite some time. This lead to me treating this class with some disregard, assuming the work would be fine to complete later rather than sooner. This was a mistake, and was quite embarrassing when the first sprint finished and I had neglected my duties as a project lead. I was informed of this, and took it to heart to fix my mistake. Thus, the journey of creating Landscaping Madness for real begun.
Over the course of development, My mental state deteriorated slowly, beginning with the tragic loss of one of my dogs and my grandfather. This shocked me, especially since both happened so close to each other, and I never truly took the time to recover. My bottled up emotions ended up coming back to haunt me, and lead to my current state of near-depression. This also lead to me missing class due to missing my alarm in favor of sleep, and lead to me barely communicating with my teammates by the end of the project.
During the development process, we communicated well at some times and not well at other times. For around sprint 2 to sprint 3, we were constantly communicating, and found a great rhythm. Unfortunately, during sprint 4, Patrick, our programmer, had a family emergency, and we were unable to contact him for much of the sprint. I believe this was when slowly, our communications broke down, leading to many moments of procrastination, especially nearing the final playtest critique.
During the early phases of development, I experienced something magical: emergent gameplay. I had read stories of how emergent gameplay arose in games like tribes or quake, but never experienced it in something that I created. Essentially, our game's function of placing down blocks was very fun for players. So fun in fact, that many players would try to break the physics engine with the block placement, by placing a block inside of the player character. This would launch the player sky high, and became a favorite feature of our game. Unfortunately, we chose not to incorporate this emergent gameplay, and I'll explain why. Due to this emergent gameplay being based on a glitch, it is difficult to test consistently. We also found it difficult to test how high the player would be launched every time they attempted the glitch. Beyond that, we found it to be very difficult and far from our original vision to design our levels around the glitch. Thus, we decided to put a box around the level to keep players from flying out like many did in the first playtest.
In the future, I would change my own work ethic, and take whatever job I am given seriously. I would also take more time to learn about the unity engine, and consider what actions the players may take when presented with the gameplay. The main takeaway from this project for me is to expect the unexpected when it comes to designing games, because you never truly know what the players will attempt to do.
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