Folded Friends - Postmortem

Although there were things that went wrong and many things that we changed from our initial plans, there were still things that went right with our final game. The delegation of work was largely handled by CJ as he created an entire production plan that we mostly followed. In addition to having weekly standup reports, internally we included standup reports for ourselves every other day to make sure that we were held accountable

The background music was created by Jentsen’s friend ProdByIceJune and he worked with him to create an ethereal soundtrack that was largely inspired by games such as Minecraft and Stardew Valley to evoke a sense of mystery and calmness.

We created some juicy animations that triggered when buttons were pressed causing trees to part like opening doors. These animations and other interactions in our game are accompanied by sound effects which furthered the gameplay experience.

We had a lot of trouble with crunch - unfortunately, the Thanksgiving break slowed production to a stop, and we didn’t pick the project back up until about a week later. Because of this, we were putting in most of our work in the days and hours leading up to the deadline. 

The crunch also made it so that we had to ship our game with a couple of bugs, particularly on level 2, which had the most complex puzzle. In level 2, the players must press the rocks in a specific order, but the rocks were too close together, which makes it so that the player may accidentally trigger a rock that they didn’t mean to, and reset the puzzle. We also had problems with the puzzle rocks’ reset animation, which does not trigger for the second puzzle in level 2. The rocks also had decals which corresponded to the order that they needed to be pressed, but when we exported the game to WebGL, the decals cannot be seen, which makes the puzzle impossible. 

Additionally, in level 3, we attempted to include a tiger with a pathfinding AI that changes state when it has line of sight of the player. Despite it working in earlier iterations of the build, whether it is because of changes to the layers, merge conflicts, or a random bit-flip from the universe, we ended up having a peaceful tiger who doesn’t chase you but only chooses to roar loudly when you get too close.

In the beginning, we spent most of our time planning and waited until the last week to make progress in our unity scenes. This caused a time crunch and resulted in a lot of stress for the developers. Because we didn’t have much time to work on it, we were not able to get other people to playtest our puzzles which is crucial for puzzle game development. Puzzle games require a lot of playtesting in order to create a feeling of satisfaction once the player solves them. This in turn would require a lot of iteration that we simply did not have enough time for. If we had more time, we would have spent a bigger chunk of our entire production time playtesting and iterating on the puzzles. As for production, we would have benefited if we found out what tasks needed to be completed earlier in order for developers to get working sooner. 

Jentsen: I would not have gotten strep throat and had more energy to actually work on the project. II think crunching a large chunk of our game at the end came back to bite us in the butt as a large portion of our game was plotted out but had to be scrapped. I would have loved to just dove straight into Unity and started the game development and created mini prototypes for what puzzles we could include. Furthermore, although I originally had the stop-motion style animations created for the horse and dog, I would have wanted to actually include them in the final build. Additionally, in the final cutscene, I was unsure of how to swap back to a camera without it panning across a scene quickly; I would have wanted to learn how to jump cut and make the camera teleport without any distortion. Lastly, I would have added custom-made sound effects rather than just using stock sounds.

David: I would have not gotten Covid 19 and had more time and motivation to work on the project. I would have also made the prefabs for the rock buttons differently since I learned that animations use an object’s local transform in order to move the object. Unfortunately, I made the rocks before I learned this so when I made a new rock button from a prefab, the animations would teleport them to the original coordinates of the first rock button’s animation. The messy fix that I decided to do was to give each rock button a parent so that its local transform would be consistent across all rock buttons. It wasn’t even exactly 0,0,0 since the y coordinate was offset by 0.031. Because of that, I had to paste 0.031 on each rock button’s transform which was incredibly inefficient. To avoid this in the future, I will never again put animations in world space.

Thanyared: If I had another chance to do this project, I would have started my part earlier and communicated more effectively to my teammates. I was given the opportunity to do level design for one of our levels (level 2), and while it was a great learning experience, it took me a lot of time to figure out how to do things since my strengths lie in programming rather than design. If I had communicated and collaborated with my teammates more, it would have mitigated the effects of crunch and we all would have been less stressed overall.

Cromwell: Personally, I would have spent more time researching how to make a more efficient audio manager so that I wouldn’t have had to go back and recreate duplicates of audio sources between multiple different scenes. Next time, I would also like to focus more on communication and coordination as a group so that we could spend less time on the planning/pre-production phase and just jump straight into our development cycle. I feel like if I didn’t push everyone to reorganize what we had already agreed upon in a previous meeting, then we would have all had a much clearer outline of what to do.

Beatrice:  I would have made a more efficient scene transition manager and spent more time making the transitions rather than a simple fade to black. Additionally, when we were creating the puzzles for our game, we should have playtested them beforehand to make sure they would have an appropriate progression of difficulty.