Hey everyone! Our game is essentially finished, so it’s time for an overall look on how our team did. Despite the trials and tribulations, I think our team can say that we made something that we’re proud of. If you’re taking a look at this project for the first time, this game is a simple game in which you defeat enemies and gather resources in order to create cool decorations for your home!

With 12 developers, we completed 1386 points across 7 sprints. Our velocity was about 179 points per sprint, so our team was doing a lot. They definitely exceeded my expectations for sure. Everyone definitely put in their best for this project.

A very obvious thing you can see when you play through the game is how beautiful our game looks! I’m glad we were able to create a stylized world that looks amazing and cute at the same time. Our enemies are so cute, it hurts to kill them!

We were also able to fit many systems into the game! Putting in the crafting and planting were relatively easy, but combat and especially the decorating were big chunks of work. The decoration system turned out to be a bit more heinous than it should have been, so it took a while for it to be complete.

As shown in our sprint statistics earlier, our team was grinding pretty hard. Our designer got a bunch of people to playtest (and more people came and playtested later in development) and us leads were on top of everything. I’m glad we did things early enough in order to avoid constant sleepless nights. We got our marketing assets done in a timely manner and our poster and gameplay trailer looked pretty neat too! I was quite proud of how one of our teammates got the panning shot footage. (Watch our trailer when you can!) I also can’t wait to see our poster on the walls of our classroom 😀.

There are many things I’ve learned from this project, which are things that I’ll keep in mind for future projects. One thing we didn’t really didn’t think about is the importance of making programmers constantly make test builds. Not only is it good for us the team to be able to bug test, it also helps us check if everything came together correctly in Github. We definitely had moments in development where the programmers were scrambling because a push set them back really hard.

One thing I learned as a producer is how helpful Excel (or Google Sheets if you don’t use Office things) is for creating the user stories and doing sprint tracking. At the beginning of the semester, I spent way too much time writing every single user story and setting the values for them manually. You can probably guess how infuriated I was that I saw the “import issues” button in the “Create Issue” menu. I knew there had to have been a way to use Excel with it. I’ll definitely be researching it over the summer.

Of course, not everything went smoothly, as there were a few bumps in the road. For the most part, it was things like bad LODs and laggy gameplay that we could easily fix within the next build. We had a Github merge issue in the later half of the project that luckily caught a few days before the build deadline so we were able to spend time fixing it and not entirely suffer the consequences.

Since our decoration system was unclearly planned, we ended up needing to spend extra time on it. The ground decoration was, for the most part, simple to get a hold of (thanks to our talented programmers) but the wall decoration took a while to get correctly as there were a decent amount of bugs with that well into the last sprint. Because of this, we had to cut out the boar enemy from the combat system. Everyone on the team was pretty bummed out about that.

Overall, I’m quite glad with how everything turned out. I will admit I was a bit apprehensive at the beginning as I wasn’t familiar with any of the people on the team. Based on previous experiences, I had pretty low expectations. But now that I’ve gotten to know all of them and their skills, I can truly say that I’m proud of the team. Congrats to everyone graduating this semester and I hope you, the reader, had a fun time with our game!