Blog Post Postmortem

The time has come for the end of this project, and I had fun if it wasn't solving confusing bad issues. That was frustrating. 

 In Development, What Went Right? (Basically what worked?)

   Out of what went right during our entire production one of the things that went really well was the grapple mechanic work as intended. As what the level design was suppose to emphasize having the grapple be controllable by the player. the grapple can extend and shrink and you can swing to side. The way we make our grapple be controllable to the player gives them their own way of playing. 

    The other thing that went right is how the Boss movement went right as intended and an unintentional movement for the boss by having it jitter. When making this the boss tries to get to the player but I have to put a barrier so it doesn't go for him. When doing this now he follow the player vertically. Now for his attack he just throws fireballs at the player and the player has to dodge them while getting to the top of the boss level.

    The third thing that went right is the Hud of the game and how it worked great with the respawn system and having the enemies reset when the player dies. For the health it works as intended when the player takes damage from the enemy. The other thing that was good was that the information on the Hud was kept through out the game which are the lives the health and the count of the nightlights.

In Development, What Went Wrong? (Basically what didn't work?)

    One of the main things that went wrong is that the dash mechanic was booted out of the final prototype. Reason is that it was broken to the point that it became spammable and exploitable. The sad part we could have not find a fix in time before our final prototype. Due to this that the level had to be only made to use the grapple and anything that was implemented for the dash was taken out. If I had more time I could have helped with the dash.

    Another thing is that so much time was spent on how to fix the enemy respawn when the player dies. This problem was fixed, but it took way to long to fix and I had to use expert help on figuring out how I can make the follow enemy respawn whenever the player dies. Even the expert had a hard time figuring it out. If much earlier this problem was solved maybe I could have had more time helping and solving the dash problem. 

    The other thing that could have been better during our process is that having better knowledge of the onTrigger and onCollision functions. the reason being is that most of the problems that we had before of player was being able to stand on enemies and having the nightlight stop the players momentum while in the grapple couldn’t happen. With that later in production I have the enemies and nightlights be onTrigger rather than onCollision. I wished I knew the difference so I didn't have to find the reason for the bugs.

What would I do differently in the future? (If you had a chance to do it all over what would you change? Or not change?)

    What we needed to do differently was having more communication early on to make sure we all had the exact same idea for the game at the beginning of production. This was a very big problem with our prototype at the start. We had different ideas that were sort of similar but did not really mesh as smoothly as we thought, and it was around the middle of sprint 2 where we got our footing and decided the direction that we are going with game. Another thing we could have done differently is have asked more help from professors on helping find fixes to certain functions we make that aren’t working as intended. this goes for the enemies reset problem and the dash. lastly another thing we could have done differently is having the levels be easier and if the feedback says it is too easy then we could edit the level to bump up the difficulty. Reason being is that we started the levels as a bit difficult notable around the 3rd sprint and if they were easier then we could have worked up the difficulty with our level designer. Including with this we should have some more input on the level rather that the level designer making it.