Postmortem

Looking back on the state of our game, the developers of Elemental have thoughts on our successes, challenges, what we learned, and possible future revisions.

• Successes

We successfully created a game where you play as a mage, collect elemental spells, and defeat an evil witch. This was our goal! We ultimately achieved the implementation of unique elemental powers within our game. The mechanics of the different spells, the UI of the spells, and having a variety of enemies with different interactions were amongst our most successful features. The game was based around the idea of using the 4 elements. Each level was design with the mechanics of each of the spells in mind, and that was pretty successful.

In creating this game, we were able to learn a lot about designing a full game with a group. We worked well together, and were able to manage our time and develop skills while supporting each other along the way. Since we developed our own scenes, each of us got to experiment to different aspects of game design, including creating sprites and animating them, designing enemies, coding their behaviors, level design, and much more.

• Challenges

This was our first collaborative Unity project. It was a major pain to discover how to keep everyone synced and avoid merge conflicts. We are storing our project in a GitHub repo, which made collaboration easier than it could have been without it.

Another issue we had was finding times where we were all able to work together. Generally, we did our own things, and ultimately that caused some setbacks when finally putting everything together--both from us trying to mix and match mechanics while modifying each other’s and breaking things, and from assuming certain features were already implemented. If we had been in more consistent communication, we could have made a more complete game with more polish.

One challenge were keeping the slimes on the tiny platforms. On the wider platforms, they sometimes glitch on the edge but they would stay on the platform and move in the other direction; however, on the tinier platform, they would walk straight of the platforms and begin glitching. This was fixed by having invisible collidable walls for the slimes, alone. There was also a challenge with letting the dying sprite animation and sound effect play out before the character gets respawned. The respawn function would get called almost immediately or midway through the animation and sound. 

Another challenge was the just pushing and fetching from Github Desktop. The water scene was completely removed, including all of the prefabs that have not yet been overridden in the scene, due to merge conflicts preventing it from being opened. Similarly, editing prefabs that were shared  between scenes would occasionally cause conflicts in other scenes. For example, editing the position of a child object prevented one spell from being cast. That problem would not have been solved until the person working on the spell figure out what made changes were made that caused the issue; this was proved more challenging to pinpoint since many people were constantly working and pushing to the repo.

• What we learned

We learned the basics of group game collaboration. It was helpful to keep a log of our meetings and upcoming plans, and it was very useful to remain in communication with group members; doing so allowed for a much smoother amount of game development, especially during the final push before the deadline.

We also learned a lot about creating sprites, animation, sound, tiling, and scripting in Unity. We learned to debug our own work and each others work. We feel our abilities in these fronts have vastly widened.

• Possible future revisions

Our game would be easier and potentially more fun to play with more intuitive sprites. For instance, our health and mana bars are colored red and blue, but nothing else is given to indicate what they stand for. 

Also, many basic platforms and sprites such as the door were plain colored squares. We could implement a better finish with more time. A lot of the levels and sprites were not matching themes, since different people worked on different sprites and backgrounds. The animations could have been smoother and there could have been more animations added (e.g. casting spells, idle movement, sticking to a wall).

Adding to player-enemy interactions is another major spot for improvement. We could give the player a small period of invincibility to enemies, and we could make enemy movements more advanced. We would like to add various sound effects to the enemies and give them more complex animations (e.g. dying, attack, etc). Adding a bit of knock back when the spells collide with an enemy would be cool. 

We would like the healing to heal over time and flesh out the mana cost and cooldown of the skills. Currently, the mana cost is uniform except for the healing, and only the water spells have cooldowns.

The volumes of the sounds and music would needed to be adjusted. There is a jumping sound that cannot be heard of the background music. Some of sounds do not match the animations too well.