Post Mortem

Team Project

Overall Impression of Team Game: I liked my team a lot and I believe that even though we had a rough start to "Game Fair", I still feel very great with the game that we showed off and worked really hard to get to where it stands.

What Went Well: I think our team working together was a really good start, we all worked really well as a team and I was very proud of how far we’ve come with our game. The build itself was playable (at first) and everyone on the team got a lot of their part of the game done. Overall the game was fun and we brought “Super Marble Rollout” to life.

What Went Poorly: What took a turn for the worse was all of the technical difficulties that we were having with our game at “Game Fair”, a game not working on the presentation day has got to be a game designer’s worst nightmare. The complications we were having were very confusing and we’ve learned our lesson, having backup copies of the game’s main build is something very crucial to have in a situation like ours. I’m not entirely sure what happened with some of the programming, but what I do know is that some of our exports were imported over some of the newer versions of our game, making the older versions save over the newer stuff we’ve worked on (sad face).

Individual Progress

Overall progress as an individual contributor: I was able to finish 2 different levels as the level designer of the whole build. Unfortunately, I was not able to make the third level or the battle arena level. I think we had very little time to playtest, there just wasn’t enough time to go back and forth with fixing every bug we’ve come across without testing it a few more times before the final build.

Describe an area of strength: Fortunately, we had an awesome group and I really appreciated all their honesty they gave me on the levels I’ve built. My team’s/ Karen’s feedback was very important to me because it pushed me to create levels that could possibly give the players a better gaming experience.

How did this impact your work?: From how my “level 1” first started off; it really progressed and became a much more relevant level, many people had a lot of good feedback on the levels. While I was observing other people playing; I noticed how much fun they were having on the level (even if it was frustrating), I enjoyed watching others have fun on the level and I also paid attention to certain parts that were annoying to get past. The feedback from everyone is enough information to help me build the next levels that I will continue on and fix the first level as well.

Describe an area of weakness: In all honesty, time was my main weakness. I wanted to go so far with these levels but like I said before, there just wasn’t enough time for playtesting and fixing bugs for each level, most of my time was spent on fixing the first level.

How did this impact your work?: Since we didn’t have a lot of playtesting time; I feel that I missed out on a lot of bugs that didn’t get fixed or there were areas that were very difficult for the players to achieve the finish line. I know that without a doubt, I can glide straight through the level and pass it without much of a big challenge, but seeing how a lot of players were having trouble with the first ramp was a big “NO NO”. This was all because I was just going based on “my” playtesting experience and not anyone else.

How can you improve this?: I personally feel that playtesting is really important and it’s something that can help me understand the fun factor that players like the most in a level or overall what the players would like to have in their gameplay experience.