DEVLOG 2: Postmortem
The development process of our game led to many successes and challenges as well as helping us learn new skills and plan what we would continue to implement if we continue this project.

Successes:

During the development of this game we had many successes with many areas where we had experience and in areas we didn’t have as much. 

One area of success for our project was in the presentation of the game. Through the simple graphics and hand drawn menus we were able to create a calm and pleasant atmosphere for our game which can help with the feeling of the outdoors.

We also were able to implement mobile controls and work on developing for a mobile platform which many of us did not have any prior experience for. When developing for mobile we needed to consider how to let the player access the controls so we made smart UX decisions and allowed the buttons to fit right where the player will be holding the phone making it easy to access all of the games controls.

We also had success when it came to making our own custom assets for the game such as the wagon model and the wolf enemy texture.  

Challenges:

Challenges we ran across with the game were definitely in the development process and with merge errors. Throughout the development process we needed to take into consideration the platform that we were making it for. When developing for a mobile platform we need to take into consideration the amount of memory we are using and making sure that this will not cause slowdowns when playing the game on actual mobile hardware. 

We also had issues with the development process where we wanted to add things but weren’t able to because of technical issues or from lack of time. This led to our game lacking some of the features or having features tweaked from our original vision.

Merge conflicts also caused issues for our game where before our playtesting showcase we had merge conflicts which reverted large amounts of progress which limited the amount of feedback we were able to get from the other members of the class.

What we learned:

Throughout this project we were able to learn quite a bit. We were able to learn about how procedural generation can work either through the idea of cycling through different tile sets as well as with full generation by creating rules for the generation of the world. This knowledge gained from this project will definitely be useful going forward if we wanted to develop our own procedural generated game in the future.

We also learned a lot about using blender for modeling and animation. We had some issues with importing the models into unity in our first try, but overtime the process became much smoother and we were able to import our models with the animations rigged up much easier into unity. Many of the members of our group also were able to practice developing models and making them look proper and consistent with the rest of the art style.

We learned a lot about UI design as well throughout this project, we learned how to use opaque buttons in order to use our hand drawn menus in order to make them look much more professional instead of having the default unity buttons across our game.

Possible future revisions:

In future revisions of the game we would like to implement the features that we ultimately had to drop either due to time constraints or other factors. Implementing full procedural generation to the game would be one of the first things we would hope to do with the existing code we have by learning how to generate new terrain as we go and delete ones off screen to save resources.

We would also like to add ways to change the trajectory of the wagon to allow for more strategy with taking the wagon on unique paths to either slow it down or to avoid obstacles.

We would also have liked to add more fluid animations to the game. Animations proved to be a bit of a difficulty for us as we did not have extensive animation experience before this project so with what we learned about in animation through this project, we would hope to be able to improve upon our earlier animations.