Sunday, June 22, 2008
Post Mortem
Post mortem Station defender
At the start:
At the start of the project we had collected some ideas for our project, we choose one that was we thought was innovative an interesting. Before we got our programmers we had play tested the game, the play test was built by wooden bricks and the weapons were represented by glass marbles. This went fine; we did also notice a difference.
When we play tested we couldn’t have a third player playing the computers role so we made our shot from our own base, as if we were the ones with weapons. This was implemented by building walls that could bounce the weapons off and turn on the other players.
When the project started for real we, Johan Lövdahl & Robert Carlsson, had a group of four programmers which was going to be divided into two smaller groups and where two of them should work on our game. We showed them an early concept picture on how the game could look like and what it was all about. The programmers were Hans and Eric from the third year.
During development:
During development most things run smooth; the programmers work hard every day and the designers were busy making the graphics and the sounds. Though we think there were some problems and some major. At first the room and computer we was given to work with was fixed very late, this made us loose more than a week on the project. Also the work with NUI was a bit time spending. If the factors outside the project had run smoother we should have had at least 2 more weeks to work on the game.
The group worked well together and the first weeks were problem free, this is not at all good and it was the effect of different factors. First off was that we designers are not educated in programming at the level of third year students. Even in the understanding of a program/game and it´s components are not at all at the same level. This made us very none problematic, we couldn’t try to find flaws or problems with their job. Though the other way around worked fine, they could comment and argue with us about the design, graphics and sounds.
In the end of the game development we worked at some play testing but the time was really short since the machine needed for playing was delivered a week late. But we did make some interesting changes at the end and it became an “almost not boring game” as a programmer said. I think we succeeded in our main goals, this was a game designed to fit by passers so that they could just stop and play in a second and so they can. Innovation was not a goal but we succeeded in some ways there to.
Solutions:
If we had worked with one year students like the rest of the groups had, then we would have been closer to the programming and making of the game. We would even be able to program our selves, this would have been not just a bonus for the project but also a great learning experience.
