Post Mortem
I feel like, although having my problems developing animations at first, I have worked well to think of comedic, fitting and fun ideas for the bosses and enemies in Toad Out of The Hole that fit with Oliver’s vision well. Although our game, in future, would absolutely need more work in terms of levels, bosses, enemies and more, I feel the work we have all done as a whole is substantial and we have a playable ‘Lite/Demo’ version of our game.
What Went Well:
Team thinking and the use of strategic cuts and diluting ideas, time scale in relation to our workload, actual production, staying ahead of schedule.
Even Better If:
Team Communication was good but sub-par, I felt like I was having to reiterate things I had said time and time again when they were fairly simple to understand. Motivation and morale was extremely low in the beginning and took a few pushes to get off the ground.
The End.
This was my final college project, after this I will be going to University in September. Oliver and I are on the same course, and I hope we will be able to work on things like this in the future together, as for the others? Luc is going all the way to Dundee, Michael is staying around local and I believe Kieron the same. Hopefully we will all stay in touch.
Out of all of the projects, whether that by Surgery Shorts, Radio Silence, or Toad Out of The Hole, I believe my best work lies in this final one. Whether that is thanks to motivation to make a great game, or the generous amount of time we had on this one compared to the measly 1 month dev cycle for the previous two projects.
Final Playthrough:
Beta Testing Other Games
In April-May time, I beta tested some other games in our college class and rated them. I beta tested ‘Down The Rabbit Hole’ and Lewis’ Robot FPS game.
Lewis’ game:
I appear to have lost the feedback forms, although I posted them in Teams. This is on Teams’ half as I posted a written review and placed it in our messages, but it has been overwritten by the blank one. Odd.
Summary:
The game is bare minimum, it is incredibly hard to look at due to the utter lack of textures and lack of animation on enemies. The ‘shooting’ sound is deafening and needs fixing. I place shooting in quotation marks as it does not act like a real gun, instead almost like a detonator for the robots to self destruct, there are no projectiles, no ammo, no bullets, nothing. On top of that, there is only one level, and that level is easily completed in 5 minutes. Needs quite a bit of work.
Down The Rabbit Hole:
The document was in the form of a google form, which I do not have access to show my answers and initial thoughts, so instead here is yet another summary:
The game has a unique art style in theory but is executed poorly, lack of animations and map detail make it quite uninteresting. Odd, white lines around some of the characters, almost like they have been drawn on one photoshop layer (best case scenario) or stolen off the web (worst case scenario). Combat is probably the best thing about this game, it reminds me of Pokemon back in the day and is refreshing, and when fully refined can be impeccable.
Toad Out of The Hole:
For our own game, it was easy for the player to get to places they were not meant to go, you could not die no matter how hard you tried, and bosses were beaten in seconds. This hopefully will not be reflective of the final product, as I designed these bosses to look, act and feel powerful in the imagined world, not to be a walk in the park.
Joel's blog 