Reflection
thetrav on 2020/09/26 22:57
of MASA-01
How's do I feel? What have we learnt?
I really enjoyed working in game development in a group setting. My previous attempts have been solo, the difference to morale and motivation is astounding, also having other people around to help with unblocking, rubber ducking and idea bouncing is massive for high productivity low frustration.
I terms of the product itself, I'm pretty satisfied. It's no AAA title, but I think it looks kind of cute, it's relatively smooth and has a beginning middle and end.
The team was very heavily weighted towards system builders over game designers, so it ended up far more an exploration of Entity Component System architecture than a player experience. I feel like if we had a keen content developer they could put together quite a lot within the framework we have developed, however that's largely beyond my ken.
I don't think I would go back and change any of our decisions on this project, however I still like to mull over them.
1 - Tiled, map editing software and file formats. This was a big win IMO. It helped set out our constraints and made planning levels pretty visual/creative.
2 - 2d isometric. This is probably the closest thing to a mistake I would say. I pushed hard for it because I have hard nostalgia for isometric, and I am scared of 3d. In hindsight sight, while it did achieve the visual gratification I craved, it gave us more constraints and brought up more problems than it avoided, which was a time sink. In future I would say if you are going isometric, try to go 3D with forced projection.
3 - ECS. Ultimately I'm very happy to have learner a lot with ECS and will use it again. In this case I feel like it didn't give us the ROI because our game was really too simple for it. Having said that, it felt like if we wanted to spend another week adding content, it would have been very cheap dev wise
4 - game & level design. This exercise was never about game design to me. It was about programming and learning. I feel like the whole area of game and level design is still quite opaque to me. Beyond very simple training puzzles I have very little clue how to build a scenario that is a fun/rewarding experience for the player. That's probably beyond the scope of a week though
Anyhow, enough rambling, time to go and have a look at the other entries. I hope you all had as much fun as I did, and thank you all for not voting goats