Peter Eldredge Postmordem
What went right
1. I think we ended up finishing with a pretty solid game. The key mechanics of flying around, building up heat, and ramming through enemies. I found myself playtesting for longer than I necessarily needed to.
2. We each had our own separate things to work on even through we had a lot of programmers. So there was not tons of overlap. Rex handled 3D assets, Abigail 2D, Sean worked on Graphical Programming, Jake worked primarily on the player movement, and I worked on the main gameplay systems. We also stepped out of our designated positions to help relatively frequently.
3. Our vision for the game remained relatively consistent and most changes were agreed upon by the entirely of the group. We didn't really have any arguments and I think everyone is pretty happy with where we ended up.
What went wrong
1. We had a really bad issue where most of the work was being snuck in the morning of the class. This left us scrambling nearly every Thursday, and sometimes work ended up not getting in in time for class.
2. While we got some variety in the game, with 2 different level objectives, 2 enemies, and 2 drastically different looks for the levels, the game would have benefitted from more variety. I would have liked more assets, more enemies, and more interesting enemy behaviors, in addition to several more, polished levels.
3. Though we each had our own tasks, the communication was not very good overall. It was very hard to get everyone together at once, and frequently not all the work that was expected to be completed was, partially as a result of this.
What I learned
I realized that I really need to structure how expectations are set better for my future teams. I think we were still able to pull off something decent, given the circumstances in which we needed to with. However, if we had gotten a better schedule with our team, and done work earlier, we would have been more flexible, been able to see/fix problems sooner, and I believe had a much better game to show for it. So my main take away is that early on meeting times need to be set, work needs to be distributed fairly and clearly, and we can't wait last minute to work on the game.
1. I think we ended up finishing with a pretty solid game. The key mechanics of flying around, building up heat, and ramming through enemies. I found myself playtesting for longer than I necessarily needed to.
2. We each had our own separate things to work on even through we had a lot of programmers. So there was not tons of overlap. Rex handled 3D assets, Abigail 2D, Sean worked on Graphical Programming, Jake worked primarily on the player movement, and I worked on the main gameplay systems. We also stepped out of our designated positions to help relatively frequently.
3. Our vision for the game remained relatively consistent and most changes were agreed upon by the entirely of the group. We didn't really have any arguments and I think everyone is pretty happy with where we ended up.
What went wrong
1. We had a really bad issue where most of the work was being snuck in the morning of the class. This left us scrambling nearly every Thursday, and sometimes work ended up not getting in in time for class.
2. While we got some variety in the game, with 2 different level objectives, 2 enemies, and 2 drastically different looks for the levels, the game would have benefitted from more variety. I would have liked more assets, more enemies, and more interesting enemy behaviors, in addition to several more, polished levels.
3. Though we each had our own tasks, the communication was not very good overall. It was very hard to get everyone together at once, and frequently not all the work that was expected to be completed was, partially as a result of this.
What I learned
I realized that I really need to structure how expectations are set better for my future teams. I think we were still able to pull off something decent, given the circumstances in which we needed to with. However, if we had gotten a better schedule with our team, and done work earlier, we would have been more flexible, been able to see/fix problems sooner, and I believe had a much better game to show for it. So my main take away is that early on meeting times need to be set, work needs to be distributed fairly and clearly, and we can't wait last minute to work on the game.
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