Personal Post-Mortem:
As we approach the end of development for Alien Arcade, it
is as good a time as ever to reflect on how it went. In general, having joined
the development after it had already been worked on for a term meant that there
would inevitably be a lot of ups and downs as not only did I have to become accustomed
to how the game was currently working, but I also had to bring a different
prospective to improve/change it up.
Issues
Concepting
The
biggest regret I have regarding this project was missing the first group
meeting since it was on a Sunday at the time (mentioned in my first PPJ).
In this meeting, most of the brainstorming for how Alien Arcade should evolve
as well as concepting game ideas took place so the majority (about 80-90%) of
the mini/micro-games made during this production were pitched to some degree in
this meeting. In my opinion, some aspects of the game seemed to be ignored to
an extent and had to be handled later in the process (such as scoring), and some
of the game ideas seemed to be missing something, and I think I could have been
an asset to bring up early issues. In general, I think not enough was done
during the concepting phase and that caused issues later where myself or others
in the group were second guessing what exactly needed to be done for a few
different aspects of the game. Looking toward the future, I definitely never
intend on missing the concepting phase of a project again because it is the
most important part in determining how smooth the production goes.
Soft spoken
In
the same vein, one issue that tends to plague me on group projects in general
is the fact that I am naturally soft spoken. For the first half of the project,
the combination of this and the fact that we were not consistently inspecting
the progress of the game as a team in a meaningful way resulted in a lot of
issues existing for much longer than they should have. Furthermore, there were
situations where I feel as though extra/unnecessary work was being put into
aspects of the game and I should have spoken up more to prevent what I
considered time sinks. For example, while the resulting alien model and
animations look really great in Draw at Noon, I still hold the belief that the
four or five weeks it took to make them (especially the time spent on the
complex animations) was not worth the effort since the animations only appears in a
single five second game and it took away time from improving aspects of a lot
of the other games. Toward the end, I got a bit better about speaking up and
mentioning my thoughts/issues, but I think it may have been too little, too
late in some cases. Therefore, moving onto future projects, I will definitely try
to continue to improve my communication skills and speak up more.
Motion base
Despite
the fact that this whole game was being designed for the motion base, I was not
able to regularly attend it considering that the open hours on Wednesday
conflicted with my schedule and I was generally busy throughout the week
working on Senior Design, the multitude of changes for this project and assignments
for other classes. Therefore, while I was putting a lot of effort into each of
my mini/micro-games to try to make the motions as obvious as possible, I was
never really able to test them to make sure they were working as I wanted them
to. Furthermore, I was not receiving solid feedback about the motions since
playtesting on the motion base was sparse. I definitely wish I would have been
able to test more on the motion base (although my motion sickness would have
made that tough anyways).
Successes
Mini/Micro-game creation
The
most fun and rewarding aspect of production for this game was definitely creating
and working on my own individual mini and micro-games. Over the course of the
term, I ended up creating four micro-games (Abducktion, Draw at Noon, Dance Off
and Whack-An-Alien) and one mini-game (G-Switch), which I believe makes up
almost a quarter of the games. This included setting up each scene, writing all
of the scripts and, in some cases, creating art assets. With all of these
different games, I was able to test my prior knowledge of Unity development as
well as discover a whole slew of new techniques and perspectives that I will be
able to carry on with me to future projects. For example, prior to working on
this game, I knew that sound effects were important, but for a mini/micro-game
collection they are crucial since players can heavily depend on sound cues to
take in information without having to break their concentration from the action
on screen.
Bringing consistency to the game
Having
learned of the importance of prefabs in earlier game classes and utilizing them
in previous projects/games to make updating reoccurring objects (such as UI) a
cinch, I was surprised at the lack of prefabs when I joined the team,
especially considering that this game would have a lot of different scenes for
the multiple mini-games. Therefore, over the course of production, I made sure
to create relevant and useful prefabs that are applied in each of the scenes,
which made updating aspects of the game a lot simpler. The biggest example of a
prefab that has saved a lot of work is the Dashboard UI prefab, since it has
been updated many times throughout the course of production and required almost
no effort to update each time after I added in the initial prefab to each scene.
In addition to UI prefabs, I helped bring consistency to the game in many
different forms, including updating the scoring logic (humans vs. aliens,
centralized score values, high score saving, etc.) as well as made sure that each
game had their own unique music and that said music was balanced between all
scenes. Moving forward, I definitely intend to continue to make sure every
project I work on properly keeps everything consistent and as centralized as
possible.
Meeting deadlines
Another
aspect of the production that I am happy with was that I was generally able to
meet all of my deadlines that were set. The only cases I did not end up hitting
my weekly deadlines were when I was waiting for an art asset that was not yet
finished. In those cases, I made sure to find another aspect of the game to
work on so that I was not wasting time. An example of this would be the few
weeks I was waiting for the alien model and animations to be completed, so
instead I made improvements to the general structure, such as updating the
InputManager to be more organized, creating a custom version of Unity’s
RigidbodyFPSController to easily change its inputs and adding the ScoreChange
prefab. Also, I made it a point to help anyone else out with any issues that
they were running into. In general, this project provided good practice for
setting realistic estimates for work, a skill that I have been working on since
my first Co-op.
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Content with Hours
(Examples included):
With the second beta out of the way, this week marks the sprint
toward gold build. Therefore, a lot of this week consisted of fixing small
issues and polishing up each of my games as it was needed as well as touching
up different aspects of the experience as a whole.
Over the course of the production, one thing that has seemed
to be neglected has been audio, especially the music, with some games still
lacking music or reusing music from other games. Therefore, since Corey had
already downloaded a bunch of music clips from playonloop.com a few weeks ago,
I went through each game, added the song that fit best and made a note of all
of these in a document. In addition, I know that there has been serious audio
balancing issues in the game, so I added a prefab to play the background music
in each game. That way we could manage the volume for all of the music from a
single place and to hopefully keep the audio a bit more consistent. (1.50 hrs)
Moving on to my individual games, I started by making a few
updates to Whack-An-Alien. Based on the feedback from showing it in class and a
small bit of playtesting, the obvious issues that were occurring dealt with the
alien moving a bit too fast and the controls being not as intuitive as they
could be. Switching the speed was a matter of changing a variable and testing,
and switching the controls consisted of changing the input strings in the
Inspector to allow human #1 to control moving the hammer and human #2 to
control banging the hammer. Also, changing the controls made it necessary to update
the human control image with Angela’s help. Lastly, there was a suggestion to
add a green light to appear in the hole that the alien was rising from to make
it more obvious and it made sense so I added it as shown in Figure 1. (1.00 hr)
Figure 1. Screenshot of Whack-An-Alien with green light and updated controls
Next, I made a couple of different changes to Dance Off to
try to make it clearer, easier and more consistent. In terms of making the game
clearer, I added team name bars to each side of the game arena and changed the
background color of each side to green for the aliens and pink for the humans
as shown in Figure 2. Furthermore, I updated the coloring of the notes that
scroll so that are more readable against the background. In terms of making the
game easier, I made the offset for a correct note more lenient, so in the case
of the humans it is about 3.5x more lenient and for the aliens it is 2.5x more.
Lastly, I made the controls of the game more consistent with the controls of
other games, such as Refueled, Space Aim and Stello Says, by making human #1
responsible for the vertical axis and human #2 responsible for the horizontal
axis. (1.25 hrs)
Figure 2. Screenshot of updated Dance Off game
For G-Switch, there was only one real issue and that was the
fact that it could be difficult to tell when you are nearing the end of the current
platform you are walking along. Originally, I intended for the platforms in the
upcoming section to be the guide, however, with the addition of the alien
instructions panel the next platforms may not always be readily visible.
Therefore, I added transparent pink zones at the end of the jump-able platforms in
order to try to more visibly let the player know they are reaching the end and
should jump as shown in Figure 3. Furthermore, I made sure these pink zones
were short, so if the player thinks they need to hurdle this then they would
still have plenty of jump to make it to the next platform. (1.00 hr)
Figure 3. Screenshot of G-Switch with transparent pink jump zones
The last of my games that I made changes for this week was Draw at Noon. While discussing the current state of the game, the team was adamant about how unfair this game was to the humans. Therefore, in addition to adding a fourth arrow sign for the aliens to press as shown in Figure 4, I also made the signs prevent showing the arrows to press until the instruction bar disappears. In terms of cosmetics, I updated the animation script to also change the alien’s texture so it would show different emotions depending on the state of the game. Also, I fixed a visual glitch that was making it appear as though the human’s bullet bounced off the ground due to the recoil motion. To fix this, I moved the location of the bullet’s start point forward so it would not be affected as greatly by the camera as it recoils back. (0.75 hr)
Figure 4. Screenshot of Draw at Noon with four signs and angry alien
Lastly, toward the end of this week, Angela submitted a HUD
gradient that makes the in-game UI (score and time bars) stand out despite the
background of the game as shown in all of the game screenshots above. In
addition to adding this gradient in the form of a prefab to each scene, I
updated the ScoreBar prefab to remove the temporary transparent black box
around it and I updated the TimeBar prefab to instead use the pink to green
gradient version that Angela had created. (1.00 hr)
Content Positive:
- Made sure every game has their own unique music
- Balanced the background music generally between the menus
and games
- Fixed various issues in Whack-An-Alien, Dance Off,
G-Switch and Draw at Noon
- Updated in-game UI (scorebar, timebar and HUD gradient)
- Helped resolve issues in others’ games
- Got five playtesters (off of the motion base)
Content Negative:
- N/A
Total Hours for the week: 6.50 hrs
