Game Postmortem

Forming Your Group & Roles

We had a meeting on Discord with our group where we established roles in our project this was important as we needed someone to handle each aspect of the game such as coding, artist etc. How we decided to pick who would do each role by writing in a document what things we excel in as someone having skill in a particular area would produce better results.

Initial Ideas for Prototypes

Now that we have established the roles in our group. We started to discuss the initial ideas we had and how they would fit into the theme of resist these ideas were a platformer where the player must get to the end of the level before the timer runs out so the player would be resisting the timer. Also, another idea was making a RTS game however in the end we all agreed on making arcade style game and that we would focus on the visual aspects last we wanted to get the gameplay fun first.

Expanding On Initial Ideas

When we were working on the project, especially during the phase where we had to create three different prototypes it felt like there was no general direction and communication wasn’t very clear so I struggled to know what I could do so in the future we should try to have more clear direction where we want to take things from the beginning.

However, at the time I decided to expand one of the initial ideas we had which was the platformer I thought about if it would be possible to make a 2D platformer In Unreal, so I made a quick prototype of that, but we didn’t decide to go with this idea for one our prototypes.

Also, when we just had our initial ideas since one of my roles was creating graphics such as logos/UI I decided to make some logos based on one of the ideas that we had at the time which was where you would play as a cat in a maze.

I mainly made these logos as I wasn’t sure what I should have been doing at the time so I just tried to make anything it would have helped if we had all been assigned tasks to do and I wasn’t sure what everybody else was doing as well.

However, later we did fix this issue of not being given tasks to do as we used hack & plan to assign tasks for everyone so they knew what they could be doing. Also, in the future with any group work that I do everyone should make clear what they are up to and keep regular updates on those tasks and should try to communicate more in the beginning.

Designing Logos For Maze Game

Firstly, with these logos, I used Citcat as this font has a cat theme to it and with this font, I added cat whiskers to the sides of the text as this lets someone looking at it knows the game is about cats and make the logo eye catching I used bright colour and in this case, it’s orange as this would be colour of the fur of the main cat and this is why the other one has a cat fur texture instead.

Lastly for this logo, I added a white outline around the text to make it stand out more by contrasting the colours and this makes it easier to read and the other logo I decided to try making a textless logo and it’s a simple cat head made using shapes.

Finalising Prototype Ideas & Picking One

We met up to finalize our ideas for our prototypes as we needed to figure out where we wanted to take our game so we settled on making the maze game as mentioned before, the other two ideas were an endless runner and lastly, an area shooter and our group was confident that this would be the one we would use for the final game.

Endless Runner Prototype

Now that the ideas for the prototypes were finalised, we all started working on different aspects of them however things didn’t go completely perfectly as with the endless runner the workload wasn’t spilt evenly between all of us as I ended up doing the whole thing myself which includes the blueprinting/coding, visuals and lastly logo design.

The only help I received from the rest of the group on this prototype was getting feedback to improve on the visual aspects of it as at the time it just had basic shapes as placeholder models and add a score system where it shows far the player has travelled.

In the future, the workload should have been evenly split between people in the group so it’s less pressure on one person and I believe this could have been prevented by that some people in the group focused more on the theory/research side of things when I feel like they could assist more with the practical side of things which would have been helpful throughout the whole project not just the endless runner prototype.

Designing the Endless Runner Logo

The general idea I had with this logo is to have a cat running behind a cityscape as this was the general idea of the game itself and I tried to make the logo convey that however at first, I was struggling to make the logo visually interesting as I didn’t have many visual elements to go off since it’s just for a prototype and wasn’t sure what the rest of the group wanted visual wise.

So, to make it visually interesting I wanted to make it have a vaporwave look to it mainly with the background that logo will have and the general use of orange, and pink to match the background and the general colour scheme that I want to go for and are used in vaporwave images.

Maze Game Prototype

However, the issue with the workload not being spilt wasn’t an issue with the maze game and the rest of the project with the maze game I was given the task of creating the UI for it which include health icons, hunger bar/meter as this was potential mechanics that were going to be in this game.

Heart Icons

Firstly, for the UI I worked on health icons, and I made simple hearts for the icons, and I made them in various styles however with these icons they appear very generic, and, in the future, I would like to try to make something a bit more unique instead of using hearts for health like most games do.

Also, the styles that I made them could have tied more into the theme of the maze game more by that they don’t really have anything to do with cats or mazes, especially the glass one which looks nice but has nothing to do with anything I could have used a hedge maze texture for example instead of glass.

Fish Icons

The only icons that I made fit into the theme would be the fish icons as cats like you fish such as tuna etc however they could have been more colourful as a game like this could appeal to a younger audience more this is what the heart icons do well.

Final Game

Once we had finished all the prototypes working on the final game went way more smoothly and one of the major things that went well was me and Toby working together on bug fixing and working together in general because of this the workload on the blueprinting side of things was even and if they were an issue with the code/blueprint we would try to fix it together so in the future on other group projects I will try to continue helping each other with work so it produces a better result.

The only major issue when working on the final game was that during the prototype phase due to the mechanics and the level being made into two separate unreal projects and we wanted to upload this all to GitHub once being combined into one project however due to how many assets packs were used in the level it was too large to upload all at once to GitHub.

We should have all worked on the same unreal project from the beginning and put it on GitHub and then slowly added asset packs and delete what we aren’t using from those packs to make sure it’s not too big in size.

Summary

In summary, at the beginning of the project communication and the general direction weren’t the best but they improved as time went on and during the prototype phase of the project the workload could have been spilt better. Some of the people in the group could have helped a bit more while doing their theory/research and I was able to help others in the project to solve issues with were having with the coding/blueprinting.