Postmortem

Intro:

Cuttle Fishin' 2: The New World is a continuation of the game Cuttle fishin', which was developed by two of our classmates. In the second edition of this franchise, using the space bar the player will navigate through the ocean and eat up little clams in order to progress the stages.

What went right:

We had a clear goal of what we wanted to achieve with help from the creators themselves, hearing what they wanted to work on in their future development of the game and as well as from our classmates' feedback of the game. Personally, as a group, we wanted to enhance the environment of the game and decorate the stages with different assets (this includes, both environment and particle systems) to have the player feel as though there were swimming into the depths of the ocean. That was something we had felt with the background progression of the original Cuttle Fishin' game. So with You Jin's artistic capabilities, we set a more colorful atmosphere while trying to keep the original vibe of first edition. Other changes we felt that we were successful in was changing the progression mechanic and changing the score count to a total collection requirement which then allowed the player to swim into the "portal', an anemone, proceeding to the next stage.

What went wrong:

One main issue that was brought up during the playtest and was something we knew we needed to fix was the cuttle fish's movement mechanic. Many of our classmates gave feedback on wanting a more powerful propelling shot when they pressed space. And although we achieved this as well has having less rotation speed when the player shot forth, we did not fix the issue with having the player wait and rotate until they wanted to shoot in that direction. We were somewhat thoughtful of decreasing the mass increment, but even a little increase of the cuttlefishs' mass would be devastating to the rotation speed as the cuttlefish got larger. We had more plans on variation with "enemies" and clam variation but we only touched the surface of having a variant of clam moving within a bubble. This was something we regret not pushing further. We also could have pushed further with juciness in our game, like having a popping sound when a bubble is a tapped. Or having a puff of bubbles shoot behind the player when they shoot forth.

Iteration / what have we learned:

For the future iteration, it is clear to fix the player movement to be more flexible to speed up the game playtime. Perhaps, it would be interesting to switch the mechanics of movement to different styles when players collect certain items. Also as we planed, we will add different enemies of blowfish and jellyfish to create the capitative game. One other thing we planned to add in the game was level design. We will change the maps that encounter the size and mass of the cuttlefish. Lastly, we will add particle and sound effects to achieve the juiciness of the game.

From this project, we learned that getting the game from another team is twice harder than creating the game from the start. We had to learn their code and intention of the game first before we touch on anything. Also, it was hard to adapt their art style since our drawing was completely different from theirs. However, we liked to keep the charming and simple design, so we needed the practice to captivate the mood of the game. After we go through all these processes, we could finally start to fix and add more components. Our team did not encounter these problems at the begging, so in the end, we had to take out some of the elements that we wanted to add in our game. After this project, we will dive into the game immediately or focus on either art or mechanics to enhance.