Capstone Postmortem
Define your final game: game description, intended player experience, platform, technology, market, team members. What changed from the mid-mortem? Set the context for the rest of your reflection.
Achromatic is a first person horror game set in a 1900's carnival overrun with a mysterious fungal infection. It is intended for players interested in horror and puzzle games and a similar player base of Alien isolation, RE7 & RE8, and Subliminal. We released on steam and itch.io for Pc and have grown from a studio of 7 to 20 over a the last two semesters.
If you plan on publishing your game, what comes next?
Small updates in the game probably cleaning up some code and systems along with organizing of notes and story elements to be more flowing for the player.
What went right?
Our team decided we were going to make a video game based on our teams strengths (Ai, Sound, Character Art)
Being more rigid with scheduling was extremely useful (burndown lists)
Focus on lots of internal issues that was fixable by the team instead of changeable external issues
Adjusting towards multidisciplinary meetings was a huge success
Lots of strong individualism in a diverse group project
What went wrong?
Lots issues with long term planning
Scope was way to high
Scrapping all previous content from last semester
did all planning based of previous semester but scrapped all previous semesters content
Lots of strong personality's on the team resulting in inperson meetings being loud and losing lots of ideas due to talking over each other.
lots of self defending during critique
misused of the leads meeting, should have been a space of hashing hard questions instead of a checkin
Lots of systems were developed in isolation and cause tons of issues when combined resulting in lots of lost time
Designers should be incharge of designing system not implementing them, this resulting in delays in bug fixing as programmers couldn't help as much
Lots of team members where stubborn on there work ethic and wouldn't adjust to something that was better for the group
lots of trust issue between members resulting in people purposely overworking
hard time with the good friend and coworkers mix, felt hard to bring up issues
How have you grown as a professional this semester? What have you learned about yourself as a developer? Give specific examples to back up your statements.
I learned a lot about my personal limits this semester as I experienced the most burnout this semester I learned a lot on how to deal with it, come back from it, and how I sometimes need to take a step back from a project to get reengaged in it.