Postmortem

Successes:

One success we had creating this game is that we were able to build off of everyone’s ideas and could come up with an elaborate and complex concept for our game. We were constantly changing and brainstorming new ways and mechanics that would make our game more engaging.

A big success for us was implementing backwards navigation between rooms. One of our team members created a Game and Room Manager to control access and links between rooms. It took a lot of work to make sure that the transitions felt seamless and to ensure that camera and spawn positions were maintained throughout the routes. 

Another success was the animations and sound effects. This is an area that our team had the least experience with and yet we wanted to make sure that the player received adequate and appropriate feedback when an event had occurred. It took some work and lots of research but we are proud of the effect that was accomplished.

A final success, albeit a small one, was the implementation of an Easter Egg in our game. We were excited about this feature and its capability to auto-win for the player. I won't give anything away but it might be worth it to go back the way you came...

Challenges:

In the same vein, many challenges we faces were achieving the successes mentioned, such as finding assets and animations for all of the functionality.

One challenge we had was getting all the smaller details of the game ironed out to finish on time. We knew what we wanted our core game to be about and what to include but we still had many smaller things to implement before the game was due, and were scrambling to finish some of the tasks.

Another challenge is that finding assets and animations for all of the functionality were difficult given the complexity of what we were trying to accomplish within the game. A lot of the free assets that were downloaded did not match with one another. Furthermore, when creating the boss scene outside, there were not a lot of matching assets to help decorate the scene.

Additionally, coming up with a truly compelling story took us some time as we wanted our ideas to be consistent with the aesthetic and feel of the game.

What We Learned:

We learned about keeping continuity in our game, for example we had to work on making sure the health progress persisted through all the rooms, and making sure transitions for the background music and sound effects were smooth when the player went from room to room. These features were important for polishing our game. 

We also learned about using AI & NavMesh with unity to make player and bots move and follow the player.

Possible Future Revisions:

We initially wanted to make room generation and room order random, so if given more time, we would like to go back and implement that feature.

We also would like to add a way to force the player to drink debuffs when they enter a room with one, since right now they can just leave without interacting if they know its a bad one. We thought about making the door lock behind the player until they collected the item. We also would like the buffs/debuffs to last longer to make them more significant. In addition, we would include a visual indication on the player to show whether or not they are still being affected by the buffs/debuffs. We would also include a health bar.

Additionally, we considered having more distinguished enemy variants, but the animations included with our character did not include other fighting styles and since we did not have experience with creating our own 3D animations, this became low on the priority list. 

Finally, we would have liked to add a cut scene at the beginning of the game to give some exposition for the story.