POLISH!
What is polish?
Polish is the act of ‘cleaning up’ your game, making certain features run smoother, animations more slick, shading and textures pop etc.
Usually polish happens after an asset lock, where the developers determine that they have added all of the things they want (or can, depending on crunch and things like that) into the game, and cannot add any more.
If you spend time making a bad feature ok, when the rest of your features are not great, you have an OK game, and not a great game. spend time to make an OK feature into a great one? Depending on how great this feature is, your bad or other OK features may be overlooked.
Example: Fallout
Games like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls are famous for their large collections of cut content and bugs especially, but this doesn’t stop the Fallout series being my personal favourite franchise, as well as a lot of other people’s too.
What can we polish about Surgery Shorts?
- I feel like some of my artwork for the game is rough and a little rushed, if I go back and improve upon that our game could look splendid
- The vibe we wanted to go for in the beginning was a more cartoon style, and I think after the project is over I will take it upon myself to get the art done and maybe even continue working on this game as a pass-time
- I would change the look of the patient, make them look more cartoon and less mannequin-like
- The game has a lot of bugs right now, and the timer looks janky, we could Polish this up by switching the font or designing a new timer.
- The timer ideas I have are a stopwatch with green text, or a green splat with red writing
- The main scene for the game, with the patient lying upon the surgery table, is static. With added animations, this could make the scene feel alive.
- I would make the heartbeat sensor fluctuate
- A neater start screen
- I would neaten up the actual game logo, add some characters in and create a ‘start’ button similar to the green X’s in game
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