Our team did a great job this semester! Thanks to everyone’s hard work and dedication to this project we won 1st place at the ECGA’s in our major! Working with everyone was such a fun time, our team really knew how to keep the morale up with consistent positivity and happy attitudes. Of course there were stressful times, but the chemistry of the team stayed strong and we all had fun the whole time. I really enjoyed my experience being the producer for this team, and I look forward to what the future holds. Now, onto the postmortem!

Statistics:

Throughout this semester, there were 1,135 points in the backlog for the team. By the end, 911 points were completed, leaving 224 left in the backlog. This makes our final velocity 130 points per sprint. Great job guys! 

What Went Right

Communication was a great asset in our team. Everyone was very comfortable reaching out for help if they had any questions. Outside of class time, our Discord server was always very active to communicate with the team. As a result, everyone was always on the same page about things and it ultimately made it easier for me to manage the team as the producer.

Class time each day was very productive, while at the same time the environment was full of jokes and laughter. Our team promoted hard work, and everyone enjoyed sending their finished work in the Discord server for celebration. Even during stressful times, this lighthearted atmosphere never wavered. 

Everyone was a hard worker on the team, there were rarely any issues with lack of productivity. Everyone played their part, and it definitely was one of the big reasons our game was fairly polished by the end of the project. 

What Went Wrong

Level design at the beginning of the semester was definitely a big issue that damaged productivity in the long run. There were no clear ideas for level design at the start, so I kept level designers on annotated maps for way too long while we figured things out. As a consequence, the level designers didn’t get into Unity to create things for a while and there ended up being issues that went unseen until the level designers could start compiling things. 

In the last sprint, the game’s performance tanked badly. There were extreme frame rate drops and long load times. Despite our efforts to curb this issue with LODs, the single giant map that made up the whole town ended up being too much for the game to handle. We ended up having to split up the map into 5 separate levels. Luckily, this fixed the issue and didn’t cause any damage to the flow of the game for players.

Completed models were often left sitting in the shared drive for too long. Issues with them would go unnoticed until someone would try to incorporate it into the main game. This backtracking to fix issues sometimes caused confusion, and it was difficult to tell which version of an asset was old and which was updated. 

There were some great models and game mechanic ideas that had to be cut due to time constraints, some of them being the robot dog and the security system. Some of their AI was made, but programmers had to focus on other things so it went unfinished. 

What We Would Do Differently

We would put the necessary people into Unity a lot faster. The level designers could be working on blockouts rather than annotated maps. 

Get reference images for the tasks ahead of time so there is no confusion about how to make something. Often when a modeling task was assigned, there would be no context for the team member to go off of, which caused miscommunication and wasted time. 

Have the modelers put LODs and colliders on their game objects ahead of time. I had made a mistake with how I assigned tasks, and the modelers had to backtrack to attach these things onto their past models as a result. 

What We Would Do Again

Create a positive and fun working environment where jokes and sharing work for celebration is highly encouraged. 

Designate a lead level designer that compiles everything together. Only having one designer in Unity who could take the other designer’s work and implement it helped curb any clashes in GitHub and ensured the game is cohesive. 

Playtest, playtest, playtest

What We Learned

Teamwork and communication really decides the semester for everyone. If there is tension and poor communication, everyone is going to be stressed out with each other by the end. If everyone works together and communicates properly, everyone will have a lot more fun. 

Programming

Our programmers Sam Keeley and Weston Campbell did an amazing job putting this game together. Thanks to them we have driving controls, an upgrade system, fully functioning UI, throwable packages, a tutorial, NPC AI and their ragdolls, game objects are interactable, and so much more. Everyone on the team was an important asset, but programmers are definitely under the most pressure. They’re the ones who access GitHub and are expected to compile everything to create the actual game. They did such great work with minimal issues, turning in the final project was smooth sailing thanks to them. 

Models & Animation

Our modelers and animator really brought the game to life. They worked so hard the entire semester to make sure this game feels like a real town full of pedestrians, neighborhoods, and various buildings. They in fact were so productive that we ran out of prop models for them, so the game designer had to come up with a whole new massive list for them to work on. Our animator, Reuben Camp, did an amazing job creating all of the walk cycles for the NPCs and the different movements for our player character Sheldon. We were so lucky to have such a talented individual on the team, the ability to make our own animations brought so much character to our game. 

2D & Sound Design

  Cyrus Swart's banner design for the itch.io page

 J     Justin Wagner's game poster design

Reuben Camp's lose/win screens

Travis Wilson's team logo design

Our sound designer, Patrick Yang did a great job compiling all the different sound effects we needed for the game. Player feedback is extremely important for the gameplay experience, and we were able to do that thanks to all of his sounds. Here’s some of the team’s favorites:

Level Design

The lead level designer Michael Houghton and Samantha Bocast did an amazing job placing all the models to create the levels themselves. Thanks to them, we have many neighborhoods, a downtown area, parks, a hedge maze, an NPC we call the trash lord, and so much more. Michael went above and beyond as well with his hard work and dedication, without him compiling prefabs and fixing issues I’m sure there would have been a lot more stress involved in the project. 

A big thanks to my team for making all of this possible!  Here's a look at Sprint 1 vs the end of the project at Sprint 7 to show how far we've come. Everyone truly did an amazing job on this project. 

Sprint 1                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Sprint 7