Postmortem

Intro:

In 5C’s, Monster Fish, Goblin, and Orange are starting their journey in a fantasy world. Their goals are to survive as long as possible, retrieve ability, defeat enemies, and reach success. 

In level 1, they need to avoid falling items from the sky and locate their own designated ability. In order to achieve those abilities, they need to help one another to reach that certain height and obtain target objects. After locating and collecting all their abilities, they will head over to level2. 

In level 2, players have to collaboratively work together in order to solve a puzzle and fight against evil spirits & a dragon to escape the underwater cave.

Success:

Throughout the process of creating the game, there were some things that we were successful in. One of the soothing accomplishments was the sound design. We were able to convey the fantasy and warm atmosphere of the game and provide personality to the character through the sound design. Moreover, we created a simple and interesting environment using layers of environmental drawings to give depth. This simple art style of the environment merged all the different art styles of the characters into a cohesive manner. Furthermore, we successfully created a cooperative puzzle in each scene to add a challenge to the game. In this way, players are forced to communicate to complete a level that we intended to design. Lastly, we were able to tutorial an introduction showing the instruction page at the beginning as the playtesters seemed to know the game's objective without any confusion. 

Issues:

• The distribution of mechanics is unbalanced. Due to the cut in scope, which saved us time to polish the basics, we had to sacrifice some of the fluidity in the gameplay. We originally wanted each stage to each have a different obstacle, and eventually combine them for a satisfying difficulty curve and game loop.
• Working remotely on a cooperation-based game can easily lead to issues in playtesting. We had to work remotely on different schedules, so we only had the chance to playtest during the short critique in class.

Future Iteration:

• In future iterations, we would like to achieve our original vision for the game, which includes a longer-form game loop, where there are progressively more difficult enemies and tricky puzzles, topped off with a boss fight. We are almost there, we just would need some revisions to our current levels, and make the ‘boss’ enemy feel more like a boss, with its own health bar and different movesets.
• Narrative was not something we really considered, due to the mash-up nature of the project prompt. In future iterations, we would establish a link between these characters, and have a more concise imaginations for what this world is they are exploring.

What We Have Learned:

• With our game, we learned how to adjust the difficulty level and the amount of exploration. Although we have a few adjustments to distribute the difficulty level curve for our game, we know what we have to add and fix to create a polished level design after this project.