Postmortem

Successes:

One of the main portions I got right was the sprint work. It was my first time experimenting in that field this heavily, and I feel I learned a lot. I understand tiling (both from artistic and implantation) a lot better than I have ever done previously. I also did a really good job in my eyes of taking an initial concept and skimming it to the most enjoyable element. I understand what my project is and what makes it fun (even if the final product did not execute this as perfectly as I would have liked). The final large success for me was the development. Having to miss a couple days of the lab I felt I had to catch up from a programming angle. I feel I achieved this.

Setbacks:

I think the largest setback for me was real world intervention. For reasons previously stated in person previously I didn't give this project the time and attention it truly deserves, and with that framework I could have honed in on time management. I spent a lot of time on art and programming, and less on mechanic building, level design, and iterative playtesting. I also feel that while my programming skills were tested and enhanced through this project I could have been more efficient and ran into errors and bugs during development.

Lessons Learned:

If I were to do this project over again with the same constraints I would shift over to programming the feel of the game at the start, followed by the general mechanics (health, and kill screens), followed by level design, then followed by art and other secondary features. This project has reintroduced the order of work needed to finalize a project. I was focusing on making a project from the bottom up instead of the much more fluid top down design, resulting in some features not being explicitly up to par.

Next Steps:

The next steps I feel are to make the game as fluid as possible. I would like to overhaul the jumping, and slamming gameplay to incentivize fast paced gameplay. I would then completely focus on renovating the level design to enhance the idea of fast paced movement. With time I would also like to finalize and overhaul enemy AI to better suit snap decision making. That being the starting place of overhaul, the rest of the development time would go to game feel. Having a screen shake and separate animation for when you slam would really add a sense of feedback for the player.