Game concept: To what extent did your game concept change from initial concept to what you implemented? If it did change, how did it change and why?
Ashley: Our game concept stayed pretty much the same in my view (since my game concept was used 😄) - a cooperative asymmetrical game based on the contrast of ability in vision, and we did it!
Manshi: It stays the same for a lot of aspects. I think we add a background story as our emphasis rather than explaining how Alice represents the marginalized group. And this definitely helps a lot while we doing the demo since we could use some visual elements to involve the audience.
Jack: The game had a clear vision throughout the whole class, though we kept adding to it as we progressed further into development, IE adding skills, background story, and other visual cues to show off what is happening in the game.
Design: How does your final project design compare to the initial design, and what are the reasons for the differences, if any?
Ashley: Honestly I did not expect a circus-themed hexagon maze at first, but after the concept art and music came out, everything started to make sense to me. The background story was also written after the design came out.
Manshi: For the skill’s design, I think it is a little bit different from our initial design. Initially, we plan to give three players totally different skills, even with different cooldown times. But either from the perspective of easy implementation or ease for the audience to understand the rules, we decide to choose the current three skills. And they all work pretty well!
Yingkai: While it was initially thought of vaguely as a maze, we specialized in having a hexagon shaped maze with three different submaps, each with their own themes. This ended up being a rather unique style of our game and allowed for fun variety in floor designs and music.
Schedule: How does your final schedule compare with your projected schedule, and what are the reasons for the differences, if any?
One difference is that we found out we needed a lot more art and music assets than what we’ve originally imagined, because of new ideas in the game design (e.g. 3 distinct areas in the maze) and advanced features we’d like to implement (e.g. skills). Also related to the skills is that we didn’t plan to do particles in our schedule but later wanted them for the skill effects. It was really nice to have two empty weeks on our projected schedule so that we were not stressed out, had some buffer, and could experiment with any new ideas and implement them.
Ashley: The physics side was mostly on track (shout out to Xiaoxiao for doing so much math on the hexagon!). The game logic side, though, took a lot longer than what we’ve originally planned but for some good reasons. We were focusing on MVP at first and didn’t want complicated gameplay, like skills. The time when we started to think about more gameplay details, is the time when we realized that we finished MVP rather early and had time to spare. Fortunately, we had lots of ideas already. Week 7 and 8 were empty on our projected schedule, but we were actually very busy and implemented many features that we thought would be nice to have.
Manshi: The network tasks progressed just as how we planned. And for game logic, we separated the entire gameplay into stages. And we completed all the tasks on time! (We should update these to our project spec lol.)
Zhiying: Thanks to our CEO and manager :) I think our project is just as what we planned out each week. We didn’t end up sleeping in the lab and we even leave early.
What software methodology and group mechanics decisions worked out well, and which ones (if any) did not? Why?
Manshi: We did not use a specific software methodology. But we usually use the lecture time when most of our group members presented to discuss specific features and effects of our game to ensure everyone agrees on the decision. Since we have sort of sub-teams on different aspects of the game, we also discussed some issues within sub-team discord or in person to get a final answer.