Design Postmortem - Sunshine RV

I am both happy and sad to share with you all that Sunshine RV has wrapped up production and updated for the last time. As our last sprint comes to a close, I will be reviewing the overall project from sprint 1 to sprint 7 and focusing on what went wrong, what went right, what I would have done differently, what I would do again, and what I learned from this project.

What Went Wrong

The biggest issue that went wrong was that Sunshine RV was slow to develop a core game loop. It wasn't developed until sprint 4 so all the playtesting sessions that we had conducted before were not optimized as all we could measure was how the models made the player feel. This would have been sufficient for sprint 1 but not for sprints 2-4. This issue was because I really wanted gameplay to be integrated between the 3D object system and the 2D user interface system. This proved to be a very difficult task as the two systems were completely separated in the scene but they needed to communicate with each other to update the player's inventory and objects that do or do not belong in the scene. As this issue was made a top priority after a meeting with our executive producers, we decided it was necessary to adopt a UI-based gameplay and scrap the idea of 3D interactions. While this solved our main issue, it made the game less immersive.

What Went Right

While there was certainly some bumps in the road during production, two of our departments faced almost no hiccups at all. Since I lead the design of the game, I wanted to give our Art and Audio departments as much freedom as possible while still retaining the vision for Sunshine RV because the goal of Sunshine RV was not to corner the market and become the next game of the year, it was to showcase the abilities of each of our talented and eager teammates with the hopes that it would help them get jobs as paid game developers. As a result of the freedom that I was able to give to said departments, audio had no issues in creating assets including songs, ambience, and feedback bits and the only issue that the art department had was with the development of assets that were to be animated. The way our program's structure is set up, most of our team members have limited, if any, knowledge of animation, myself included. So, this issue was practically unavoidable for Bootleg Studios.

What I Would Do Differently

Should I start the project all over again with the experience that I have now, the most important thing I would do differently would be to focus on work done such that tasks are completed in a manner that allows for the full development of one feature before moving on to the next feature. This is most important with regard to our engineering department. Another reason why we were slow to develop our core game loop is that I wanted all of our engineers to program each feature altogether. The idea behind this method was that each engineer could work in parallel with some features to kill two birds with one stone (or two features with one developer). However, it caused the engineers to be less focused and their work to become separated when they should have been working together to develop one feature at a time.

What I Would Do Again

The best part about working with my team during the production of Sunshine RV is that it didn't feel like work or an assignment at all. It felt like we were doing what we loved to do together as a fun side project. This made for high motivational levels and fun memories during production. All of this is attributed to the fact that Bootleg Studios started strong with icebreakers and team-building exercises. This is one of the most important things that a leader can do for their team. I accomplished this by first gathering our team together with a short, motivational speech about how I wanted everyone to not view the project as our capstone assignment but to imagine that we had just been hired at a company called Bootleg Studios to deliver Sunshine RV. Afterward, we all discussed a little bit about each other so that we could become more comfortable working together. Because of this, each member was more proactive and motivated to perform well. 

What I Learned

As I mentioned earlier, most of our team lacked the knowledge of creating animations. At the beginning of production, we only had one animator. She was kind enough to share her knowledge on the topic which helped the project significantly. I also made sure to include myself in conversations with her and the 3D modelers on topics about how 3D objects need to be modeled if they are to be animated. Previously, I thought that even low-poly models could be animated but, as it turns out, animated models need a really high amount of polys to function well. You might have noticed that the only objects that are animated in Sunshine RV are the airplanes in the background, the car that drives around, and the humans that appear and disappear from the scene. This is because the humanoid figures took so long to develop for the modelers to understand the animation process and produce sufficient models for animation. Luckily, Bootleg Studios was given 2 additional animators towards the end of development so that we could produce more animations. However, each animation for the humanoid model took about 1-2 weeks to create which only allowed for the creation of about 5 animations given the amount of time we had left. Unfortunately, an unknown error prevented all but two of those animations from playing in the game which are the ones that you can currently see. Now that I have a better understanding of the animation process, I can more accurately determine the feasibility of animations when designing future games.