Postmortem

  Introduction: 

 Shadowed Secrets is a 2D Top-Down Mystery adventure game taking place in an alternative historical 15th-century castle. Your(Artios) goal is to explore a castle riddled with danger and monsters to find illion(his lost brother) and unlock the secrets of the grimoire. Solve puzzles and defeat bosses. Our team Beyond Binary is composed of Justin Costa, Thomas Alves, Shikarharsingh Kshatriya, Ivan Alas-As, and Muhammet Matt Akkoc. 

Team Roles:

Justin Costa(Leader):

• Team lead

• Game Director

Thomas Alves

• Programmer

Ivan Alas-As

• Artist

Shikharsingh Kshatriya

• UI Programmer

Akkoc, Muhammet Matt

• Programmer

Production:

Weeks 1 - 3(First Playable:

We had a lot of ideas and planned for what structure our game would be. We had thoughts of Zelda, Vampire Survivors, and Dark Souls as our references and we all agreed that we wanted to make an adventure game. We had come to an agreement that we should make an adventure puzzle solver with us defending ourselves against undead enemies. We had the layout out of our first floor. Our biggest issue was that we had a lot of git-hub-related issues with merge conflicts and work being pushed to the wrong branch. For the first couple of weeks, we worked out what we wanted our game to be and what we wanted it to look like.  

(This was the first layout for the first floor)

(Image above - Final decided layout of first-floor)(Image below - First sketch of Artois) 

Weeks 4 - 7(Alpha):

After the first playable, the development of this game was at a very good pace. We added new things to the game every week and had confidence in the scope that we had imagined for our game. The biggest problem we faced was our lack of communication for who was doing what task, when we were working on said task, and when we finished said task. We had a lot of work being done but nobody knew when people were working on the game at the same time as you leading to merge conflicts and headaches for the team. We gradually got better at managing our tasks for each other and setting a clear understanding of what everyone was doing for the week, making sure there would be no merge conflicts in the future. This quarter we had improved our game with lighting, sound, and another floor layout. (Images of floor 2 layout, before and after adding light).

Weeks 8 - 11(Beta): 

We had made a lot of progress on our game and we gained a new member and wanted them to get familiar with our game. We as a group took a dip in development as we were focused on other classes and work. Our biggest issue was our continued lack of work delegation. We had a lot of work to be done but nobody stepped up to do it, while also getting confused with who was doing what. The biggest thing that went well for us this quarter was that we improved our knowledge of the Unity game engine and GitHub, making development issues in the past not a big concern. Our game had small improvements with gameplay but the major addition was getting the layout for the final floor done. Once we had the layout for the final floor we all knew as a team to not add anything new and big to our game if we wanted to complete it. We had a lot of stuff implemented into the game already and if we added more it would be too hard to finish by the end. This quarter of development was both slow but essential to our game's final design. 

(layout for final floor and plans of what content will be in each room)

(added rooms with complex layouts for a better gameplay experience)

Weeks 12 - 15(code release):

The final quarter of development was rough for the whole team. We had priorities other classes work over our game and the development was stagnant. We had the base of our game complete with 3 floors, and 3 bosses but we still hadn’t got to debugging as a development step until the final week. We had added all our animations, sound, tilesets, enemies and player sprites, and abilities, so this quarter mainly focused on tweaking our current components to make them fit within our game's scope. One of our biggest problems with the quarter was the fact that we all had other tasks to do not related to our game, making development stagnant and slow, there was nothing to be done about it other than the fact to balance the time with development in our game and other work. Besides the slow development progress, we have our complete game with a total of 3 floors, 3 bosses, puzzles for the player to solve, enemies for the player to fight, and much more   (Finished First Floor)

(Finished Second Floor)

(Finished Final Floor)

Conclusion:

At the beginning of our development we had imagined a bigger more complex game, to say that we accomplished that is a stretch but our finished game is still within the scope of what we imagined. With us going through the positives and negatives of making our game, for the future, we know to prioritize communication with each other even if it's just about saying that “I did no work today”, even a little bit of communication is better than nothing. With our biggest hurdle being our knowledge of GitHub and the Unity engine, we all now know more and understand what to do to not bring up past problems for the future. We gained new knowledge for game development and how to work in a group for so long that the negatives we faced will only turn out positive for us in the future. Our final biggest hurdle we faced was work management. We figured out that people don’t like to take initiative and assign work for themselves and it would be better for others to tell them what to do. We learned from the weeks of being in a group together that if we assign each other tasks for the week our problems decrease dramatically. Every problem we face is a lesson of what to improve on in the future and everybody realizes that we had a fun time developing our game Shadowed Secrets and we will only improve our understanding of what it takes to make video games for the future.