Task Completed:
Balance (2 hours)
Main menu polish (6 hours)
Dizzy anim fix (1 hours)
Playtests (2 hours)
Total hours: 11
What Went Well?
Some okay work week. I started off strong by iterating on last week’s balance, testing, and implementing it before our playtests began. After that, I helped with our usual Friday playtesting session. My work slowed down until I did some needed main menu animation polish, touching up animations and improving the animator flow. Lastly, I fixed a bug with the stun animation caused by an issue with their animator set up. Overall, good work.
What Could Have Gone Better
There are some additional polishing features I wanted to get to this week that unfortunately were left incomplete. I could have finished them with some additional time; but the final weeks of a term are never full of free time. However, the biggest issue for this week were issues with the animator on the main menu. Many people wanted the unit to seamlessly transition from one animation to the next; but the animation breaks if it blends between the scroll and any other. Because of that, I tried to create an animator set up that would transition back to idle after the scroll animation before moving to the correct option. This ended up not working at all, leading to more issues than it fixed. I changed it to blend seamlessly on all animations, except out of the scroll anim. It isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing.
Upcoming:
Balance
More juice
Personal Postmortem
So, here’s the end of workshop term 2. Its interesting how things developed over the past 10 weeks. My role in the team was rather consistent with my description: generalist artist and design lead. I was able to make a number of strong art assets and visual improvements for the game; however, design lead doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as it did in term 1. Instead of being the main design person, I was more the lead of a couple team members that are all interested in design. Design decisions were made less among a few people and more as a collaborative effort among many people.
Three things that went well:
- Animations were one of the elements many on the team really wanted for this term and they went rather well. The animations I worked on are relatively strong in terms of general presentation. While perhaps needing some exaggeration for the far-off perspective, they are all visible and convey well their general purpose. Not to mention, the interactive menu adding some animation polish to the overall experience.
- Keeping things consistent was another good part of my performance. It seems like a risk when entering the second term of workshop, where the team size doubles and there are a lot more cooks in the kitchen. But in early design meetings and talking to other artist, it was easy to establish and reinforce the direction of our game and where it should go. It was also good that I continued my philosophy from last term of not over-scoping the project length we had.
- Deadlines were always met. Not just for me, but the entire team was good about completing the tasks needed when they were asked (with exception to the fix exploding on the programming side).
Three things that could have gone better:
- I need to be a bit less defensive with design ideas. While I think its good to argue for and against different points of view. In hindsight, some of my defenses were rather unnecessary and the better option was the newly suggested one. This isn’t to say, I couldn’t take constructive criticism or new ideas; but I often quickly jumped to the defense of existing concepts more than new.
- I, personally, fell into doing too many late nights before class. Finishing work at such a late hour can hurt the final product. It also made the job for coders to test and prepare the build much harder. I often needed to keep coders awake so my features could be in the build or my features simply wouldn’t be there. I was not the only one to fall to this failing, but it proved problematic throughout the term.
- Playtests proved to be very challenging. While early on, we were capable of completing playtests with one session or two. The larger requirements like 30 or 40 became incredibly difficult to meet. In future, we need more avenues for finding playtesters than harassing people in the labs.
Not too bad for a workshop 2 performance.
Moving forward into senior project, there are many elements that should be considered. I should be more open and accepting of design idea. Writing a GDD can make it feel like “your baby,” but it isn’t. Game design is inherently collaborative. Formally structure what art assets are needed and plan around your team. The change in aesthetic for workshop 1 meant less art assets were needed for workshop 2. Create more stable opportunities for playtests, so you aren’t scrambling just before a deadline.
Pharaoh Hound Games 