Once production had finished what we had was essentially done minus debugging and testing, but I also mildly assisted with level building in both areas as cleanup so it'd be easier to texture and work with. So here is my post-mortem analysis of the entire project as a whole.
Performance Against Goals -
Goal: Create a playable character who can interact with the world, have UI that shows the current game objectives. Have at least 1 enemy who can trigger a lose state towards the player. Items for the player to interact with.
Overall Performance/Outcome: 1 playable fully animated character who can interact with the world, UI that shows the current game objective. Basic security guard enemy and camera enemy for the player to avoid. Fully decorated environment showcasing a tutorial for the player to learn puzzle elements of the game. Keys the player can interact with to complete an objective. Alongside this a second, less polished level.
Performance Against Schedule -
Schedule was very much blown off of course due to Covid-19, and I feel plans would have went ahead faster and also believe we'd have much more substantial a project to show for ourselves were circumstances better. This being said, despite setbacks, I feel we managed to keep some level of continuity with our project workflow for it to somewhat represent our initial gantt chart. Although this is all true we did come up very sharp to our deadlines.
Performance Against Quality -
Despite having a final product relating back to early plans it's unfortunately the case that we did have bigger plans than these, such plans including a much more crisp 2nd level with more areas with more objectives and better visuals with shaders, a 3rd enemy, the 'cleaner' and more sounds. However it remains true we managed to retain our initial minimum goals and feel we keep some level of quality present.
General Analysis of Early Stages in Planning -
Generally I feel we managed to be realistic with our goals and expectations, level maps, assets lists and concept art nicely demonstrated our views for the project and gave us a good scope of view of what it is we wanted to set out and do, whilst ensuring it'd be a bad idea to become over-ambitious. Izzy, as project lead very nicely communicated to us her thoughts and ideas and made sure we were well aware of what had to be done and how she wanted it to be done. Onwards through pre-production planning proved very useful.
Key improvements in our plan would definitely be to commit to extensive Research and Development to solve problems then and there to prevent later mishaps and make changes in our plans as needed. Whilst this was applied to things such as our decision to change the format of the camera, things such as the under-anticipated scale of the development time for the character and their animations was overlooked.
Assessment of the Game's Creation -
Things were pretty smooth sailing until Covid-19 and can only imagine how much better our final product would've been had we not been hit by this. Once we were forced to go into lockdown I barely managed to get a lifeline from a friend in the form of a working computer to do absolutely anything at all and Aaron had issues with his PC and needed a new one so level building was set back a little. Communication was also limited quite severely but still held small weekly meetings to assess where everyone was. Despite this everyone's individual chip ins on this project were in my opinion very good and I feel without any one person in the project we'd be in a very bad position. Unfortunately because of this it also meant I didn't have a PC capable of running our texturing software, so I couldn't bear that task as initially planned.
My Own Contributions -
My contributions to Stray Soul came in the form of working as a pair with Aaron on level design and planning asset needs. Within production I 3D modelled, colour grouped and UV'd a chunk of the models for the finished tutorial and unfinished main level. Alongside this I assisted Aaron with core level assembly in Maya by cleaning up everything for Izzy to work with in Unity.
To improve the processes I was involved in I feel I could take some of my advice from the production blog and stick to smaller poly-counts for the sake of the game's performance and also keep to a better theme. Alongside this when it came to level design I feel we should have put more time into it and consider things such as areas where things wouldn't make sense for example in order to have the level flow better.
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