Postmortem

Our work on the game was without a doubt a challenging but rewarding experience. We were initially concerned about whether or not our vision was too ambitious (some playtesters and other classmates also suggested this early on), and while we ended up scaling things down to a degree, we can all justifiably say we’re very proud of the work we put out. The amount of improvement made within the last week alone was tremendous. 

Essentially, we were almost making two levels--the abandoned warehouse and the city skyline. From a pure level design perspective, we thought that our back-and-forth with the memory scenes was a great idea and very well-made, serving both to teach the player mechanics and show the protagonist’s backstory through gameplay; killing two birds with one stone. 

All of these were in one scene and it greatly improved the world and progression of our level, however the workload increased significantly, especially in the art/visual department. While we made great progress in improving the look of the game (especially within the main building), the city scenes were so large that it was almost impossible to cover all of that ground within our time constraints, much less populating the streets with vehicles and lights. If we had scaled our level size down more, we could have been able to focus more on polishing the interior area. This would have allowed us to add a few missing details, such as making the interior walls look older and more worn-down.

On the audio spectrum, the overall soundscape could have used a fresh coat of paint, including integrating all of the effects in 3D while at the same time not being too loud or too quiet. Original music was also planned to be composed for the project but with the amount of work to finish before the deadline, priority shifted entirely to sound design and narrative cohesion. Additional and clearer/more cohesive scenes and dialogue to push the backstory of the main character and their bot companion further would have served to tie the whole thing together. 

The game and all of its mechanics function properly and fully as intended. Each puzzle is placed in its ideal spot for progression and makes use of the abilities the player learns, however small bugs and lack of polish detract from the overall intuitiveness of the gameplay. There are select moments where players can be softlocked, the movement of the robot NPC is a bit clunky and could have used a proper navmesh, and there was too much hard coding being pushed into a single script (Scene_Changer). A dialogue system should have been implemented as well, as opposed to coding in each line. If this project were to blossom into a full game rather than a single level, all of the mechanics could be utilized to their full potential and we could open the way for more creative and challenging puzzles. 

A lot of work piled on towards the end of the semester and a lack of communication and consistent scheduling led to us having to scramble a bit in the last week to meet the deadline. Each playtest and beta launch was lacking in progress and polish and we were unable to gain valuable criticism up until the final round of playtests and given the option to go back, we would all manage the available time better to further take advantage of the in-class sessions. In particular, we could clean up all of the code, add details and improve the aesthetic of the city landscape, polish all of the sound design and make the narrative stronger, and work out all of the bugs, which could make for a very promising first level of a potentially great game. 

Nonetheless, the finished project was a great achievement for us. Great progress was made in a short amount of time and it still has so much potential to grow. While GRVTY has its share of flaws, we were all satisfied with what we were able to accomplish as a team.