Team Donkey- Final Presentation Notes
Hello! This is David Chi from Team Donkey providing a post-project summary and review.
Ultimately, we managed to get a significant amount of our target goals completed. We completed our entire low bar and target bar feature set targets, while also implementing a power up and different obstacles in our high bar. Unfortunately, we were unable to hit the high bar feature set targets of ramps, non-linear aisles, and advanced 3D models. Additionally, even though some light work was done porting our game to have iOS support, we ultimately decided not to pursue that route and opt for more development and focus on the Xbox 360/PC controls instead.
That said, I am very satisfied considering that we had originally not expected to have a lot of time to get to our high bar targets. We worked very hard and managed to get all of low bar and target bar goals completed very quickly, giving us more time to polish up our game and complete some of the high bar goals.
Based on what our weekly logs and general reflection, there are a few things that I would change if given the opportunity to do this project again. One of these changes would be setting bigger and bolder feature set goals. Although I think the goals we created were of appropriate depth and difficulty, I think that if we were even more ambitious, it probably would not have hampered our overall progress. My team’s work ethic and team work exceeded my original expectations, and next time, we’ll make sure to take advantage of that by creating a bigger, more complex project that can leverage our talents and skills more. We edged on the side of caution, but in the future, we will probably want to be more risky with more daunting tasks.
In addition to this, in the future it would be very helpful to get testing started as soon as possible. We did not do substantial testing until the Alpha build, in which then we realized the tremendous help that feedback provides both from a bug-fixing standpoint to a design standpoint. We were able to find a lot more glitches that we could not have found ourselves, and we received extremely beneficial commentary and critiques that provided an alternative viewpoint to how we could implement certain game mechanics. In the future, we would want to get more of this as soon as possible so that our game can immediately make improvements early in the game development cycle.
Finally, this is a minor change, but in the future, I think it would be extremely beneficial to have a devoted artist on our team. Although I think I did a fine job using whatever assets I could scrap together, using original art assets that can be custom tailor made to be consistent with whatever metaphor you are presenting would be immensely powerful and I think, would improve our game a lot.
All in all, I am extremely satisfied with the work my group did and we have learned a lot from the project overall.
And for those that have not seen it, below is our video for Banana Surfing!
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