Eggs With Legs Semester 1 Postmortem
My first semester with Eggs with Legs is over, and it was a long journey. I’m super glad for it, although it is nice to have a break. This whole semester went much better than I could have hoped for given the conditions we find ourselves in today with a global pandemic going on. I’m so happy with how Junkpunk has turned out, mostly due to how much fun it was to work with the rest of my team. This has been, by far, my favorite team to work with so far. We just meshed so well together, and we all had the utmost respect and trust in each other. Our game was also one of eight out of eighteen or so games that made it through the Greenlight process as well, so we get to keep working on it next semester! Last week we also got the opportunity to add another eight members to our team who we will be working with over the coming semester, and I’m extremely excited for that as well. All eight of them were hand-picked, and I feel like they will fit the culture and general vibe of Eggs with Legs perfectly. They’re also incredibly talented as well, so I can’t wait to see what we’ll be able to accomplish together!
Looking back, both at the game and at my past reflections, I’ve really done a lot of things this semester. We started by picking a game, which was quite a process in itself. We spent so much time deciding on which game was going to be the best for us, and that really helped us figure out who we were as a team and what we wanted to do. We ended up not even doing the first game we decided on, the library-roguelike, which was our original first choice game, and picked Junkpunk over it. Honestly, although Junkpunk was originally my least favorite game concept, I am so glad we chose it. The roguelike would have been too similar to another game that went through Greenlight, called Through Rust We are Returned, and honestly I’m not sure if we could have done it better than they did. And I wouldn’t have needed to learn as much about lighting if we had gone with that game as well, since it would have been 2D. I also just like Junkpunk’s mechanics better than what we had for the roguelike now, too.
The next thing I spent a lot of time on was working on the Unreal Engine prototype for our Time Thief game. I still kind of wish we had worked on it, although I got to spend the semester also working on it on my own for my Level Design II and Game Technology II classes, which was really fun. It just wasn’t really a good fit for the team since none of us had worked with Unreal before. “Learning Unreal for it has been… a process… so far, but I’m getting the hang of it now, which is nice,” is what I said in my reflection for sprints two and three, and we would have been so much further behind as a team if everyone on the team had to learn how to use Unreal Engine.
Something we did earlier on in the semester as a group was that we all got together and watched the movie Real Steel together. This was partly to help us come up with ideas, but also partly as team bonding. Both parts of this were incredibly helpful. The movie really inspired us and the direction we wanted to take the game, as well as giving us a whole bunch of level ideas that I’m excited to work on in the future. It also helped us get to know each other better, since we didn’t actually all know each other before we started working on the project together.
I next worked on the greybox for a starter/tutorial level, which came out okay. It was nothing to be proud of, but it helped me get back into using Unity and Probuilder to help design levels in a 3D environment. I then swapped over to creating a Level Design Document for a new level, which was going to be based on a factory. This level is the one that ended up in the game, and I was very proud of it. The level design document came out pretty well, and I’m reasonably happy with it as a non-final production document. I ended up deviating from it a bit in the actual level, especially on the asset list part of the document.
However, I think that the level turned out really well (even if I deviated from the LDD a bit)! I spent a bit of time working on making the greybox for the level, although it didn’t get added to the game until much later. I was reasonably happy with the result, but the level wouldn’t really come into its own until I got to lighting it and adding post-processing effects. After the greybox was done, I spent a week adding the art assets we had into the level to help bring it from a greybox into an actual level. I did also spend a bit of time on-and-off updating it throughout the rest of the semester as our artist finished up new models. One of the longest tasks I worked on was the lighting and post-processing effects for the level. I had to spend a lot of time researching and tweaking the placement and values of the lighting, and all of the settings of the post-processing effects since I had never worked with them before. In all, I spent three whole weeks working on those two things, but I am super happy that I did. I never could have expected them to turn out as well as they did. I tried my best to recreate a piece of concept art that Brooke (our artist) had made for us in the game itself, and I got very close to doing it. It made the level look absolutely stunning, which I never really expected to be able to do, especially on my first real attempt at lighting. I’m really looking forward to making more levels, and seeing how to light those ones.
This whole process of making the factory level was very enlightening to me. I’ve never really had the chance in previous classes to take a level from greybox to final product before in a 3D environment, and I learned a lot from the experience. Messing with the assets given to me, and with lighting was a super-valuable experience, and it really helped cement me as a level designer, and taught me just how fun the second half of the process is, other than just the actual designing of the levels. It has really helped me round out my abilities as a level designer. While I was reasonably comfortable with the actual design process and greyboxing steps of level design, this just helped me learn a bit more and practice those skills to get even better at them. Next, it was an incredible first experience with the second half of level design, the part where I take it from greybox to final product.
Now that I’m done talking about the project in general and reflecting on it, I’d like to get to the more standard parts of a postmortem: What went well, what could have been better, what I could have personally done better to make the game & development process better, and what I would do differently if I had to do it again.
What went well:
One of the biggest things that went well happened before the semester even started. Last year, about halfway through the second semester, we were asked to start forming teams for our Capstone project. This went so much better than I could have ever imagined. This team has been incredible. We have so much trust and respect for each other, and we all care so much about this game, it has just been incredible. Our working environment is amazing and we all get along so well with each other. We have quite a few arguments about the game, but it’s because we are so passionate about making this game the best it can be. However, despite our frequent disagreements about how to proceed with the game, no one ever takes it personally. We’ve all been so professional about the game, despite being so close as a team, and these discussions have had so much impact on making the game as good as it is. These clashes between members of the team always end up with us agreeing on one thing to do, and no one has left angry at the end. Although arguments might sound like a bad thing, they’ve been a really good thing in this group since we all know that the other people are not making personal attacks, but just trying to make the game the best they can. In addition, everyone on the team is just so good at what they do. Riley, our producer, has done so much behind the scenes to keep us all organized and on track. Max, the other designer, has had to fill so many roles and has done really well even though he’s been stretched quite thin. Plus, his QA analyses have been so incredibly detailed and they’ve helped us figure out what people think of our game and what is working or not working with it. Brooke, our artist, has made some amazing looking models and textures, even though it isn’t her specialty (she does 2D character art and animation). Plus, she is always so thoughtful when it comes to her art, thinking about things like shape-language, color choice, irony, and even comes up with amazing names and stories for all of her assets, which just help to cement the game’s world even more. And finally Jake has just been an incredible programmer. Most teams this semester had two programmers, but we only had one. Frankly, with the speed at which Jake works I hardly even noticed that. He’s also had so many ideas on how to make the game better too. It’s been so great working together with this team, and I can’t wait to continue working with them, and all of our new members, next semester.
The robot customization system has been such a huge draw for our game. Our programmer Jake spent so much time on it, and it turned out so fun to use. Even though our combat isn’t the greatest, the customization system alone makes the game fun. Here’s what I said about it in my sprint 6 and 7 reflection: “Customization, however, has been going great. Testers have loved just messing around and making their own robots with all of the parts we’ve given them. One of our questions has been “How interested would you be in playing this again after more development?” and the responses to that have been improving more and more each time we test. I think this is mostly because we have the new customization system in, as well as a few art assets for the robot parts.” The customization system made this game what it is, and it will only get better as we refine the UI for it and add more parts for users to play with.
The lighting for the game turned out so much better than I ever could have hoped for. It might sound a bit repetitive, but I really still am in shock at how well I got it to turn out. While it was a bit frustrating at first since I had no idea what I was doing, it quickly became much more enjoyable to work towards getting everything to look just right. “I’m still working on lighting so that we can get the game looking a whole lot better, and while I was messing around in Unity during our meeting today I stumbled across something that looked really good. I want to spend some time polishing it and I think it will work out really well,” (Sprint 8 & 9 reflection). I am so glad I spent all that time learning how to do it, and the additional time to get it to look exactly as I wanted it to. The lighting really tied the whole level together, and took it from somewhat plain looking to being rather striking, in my opinion. I can’t wait to get back to working on the game and adding more levels to it.
As I mentioned earlier in the team section, our team spent a lot of time discussing things to figure out how to make the game the best it could be. This is a paragraph from my first reflection as part of this team, and I think it really helps explain what I mean: “We have three game concepts that I’m extremely excited for now, and I think that’s due to how much discussion we’ve had about each one. We’ve spent hours in discussion over even smaller aspects of the games, and I think this has really benefited the team. While it does eat up a lot of our time, it has allowed us to all share a unified vision of what we want to make, and it also helps ensure that these concepts are as good as they can possibly be. I’m having a very difficult time figuring out which of the three I want to spend the rest of the semester on, just because they’re all so unique, and such cool concepts. I expect to figure out which one we will go with over the next week or two as the other prototypes are finished.” This paragraph from my next reflection also talks about our discussions: “At the end of the last sprint we picked our final concept. We decided on Junkpunk, the robot building game, after a lot of deliberation. We spend a number of hours going back and forth on the benefits and challenges of each game to eventually decide on which one we wanted to do. It was really a challenge for us to pick which one we wanted to do, since the entire team loved all of the concepts so much. But, we eventually picked Junkpunk for a number of reasons. Overall, it had the most excitement from the team. We also felt that it was one of the more in-scope games of the three. Also, we felt that it was the most unique game of the three, without many other games like it out there, so we’d be creating something completely unique in the games industry, rather than the other two games which did borrow elements from other games.” We put in so much thought, discussion, and time into every decision we made, and it really shows. Our game wouldn’t be half as good if we didn’t spend as much time as we did on discussing things, but since we did it made the game something that I can be proud of.
What could have been better:
Now, let’s get into some of the things that went wrong this semester. The biggest and most obvious one is that we’re working on this and trying to study in the middle of a global pandemic. This, to say the least, has not been great. Working remotely from everyone else always makes communication so much harder. I’ve found that working remotely is not for me, as I lose motivation and burn out so much faster while doing so. Quarantine and lockdown has been really grating for all of us, and has just overall negatively affected how much work we’ve got done.
We also lost a week of work that we were supposed to do at the beginning of the semester due to a misunderstanding of the directions from our teacher: “... that most people wanted to work on a roguelike, which was great because I wanted to do that too. We then started building off of an idea that Max, the other designer, had already come up with about a post-apocalyptic library that the characters had to search through to find information to save themselves. However, this is where the misreading came into play. We thought we had to come up with three different systems for this game, and prototype them on Sprint 2, but we actually needed three game concepts with different prototypes.” That came from my first reflection, and what essentially happened was that we thought that we could make three prototypes for one game, but doing different systems in the game for each of the prototypes. So, since we didn’t present three unique ideas for game prototypes that week, we weren’t able to continue to the next step of production, putting us a week behind everyone else. In the end though, I’m kind of glad for that mistake. Although we lost a week, it caused us to take another look at what game we wanted to make, and we ended up changing from the roguelike to Junkpunk, which I mentioned earlier.
Something else we could have done better was taking more risks with our game. This is our last chance to make something we want to without worrying about whether it will sell well. Junkpunk, however, is a very safe game, with mechanics that have been done before, although in different ways. We also got very scared after a meeting with some developers at Rockstar Games. They told us that we needed to scope way down, and this had the side effect of making us take even less risks with our game. While the feedback from Rockstar was very good, it did have a few negative impacts on our team. “We also got to meet with some of the developers from Rockstar, thanks to our Career Center setting up a meeting for us. They had a ton of good insights, and at tonight’s meeting we’ll be discussing that, and what we think we want to have done for Greenlight, and I’m really looking forward to it.” That was from week seven, and the atmosphere in our team completely changed after that because of the feedback from the meeting. Here’s a paragraph from the next reflection I wrote to show the change in mood: “We only have a week and a half left before senior presentations, so time is quite limited now. We’ve cut back to the bare necessities to get the game ready for the presentation. So far we’ve cut a few things, like some textures, almost all of the UI, and VFX so that we’ll have time to polish everything else. We wanted to get the game looking as good as possible, and as playable as possible, so we’re really only focusing on things that we think are achievable in a week, so that we can spend the rest of our time really polishing our presentation.” Even though we had almost a month left after our meeting with Rockstar, we started to feel super rushed and out of time, so we started playing it safe and massively cutting down on what we wanted our game to be.
Two of the other things we struggled with were gamefeel and the controls of the game. We never really devoted as much time to making the game feel better in combat as we should have. I was too busy working on the level and Max was too busy with pretty much everything else, so we never got around to it. Moreover, we had to spend a lot of time getting controls right, since while we originally planned for the game to be played with a controller, we had to change that due to difficulties with getting the game tested, which I’ll get into later. We had to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do controls, but they still didn’t turn out the way we wanted, and a lot of people didn’t like them. From my week six and seven reflection: “Based on our results, we haven’t been completely giving the experience that we want to. Controls and driving have been a major frustration to players so far. We were trying tank controls, since that is what most people in robotics used, at least back when I did it in high school. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really translate to mouse and keyboard very well, so it was rather frustrating to our testers. Jake has already taken this feedback and completely reworked the driving system, which was awesome. It feels a lot better to me, and as soon as we get the game back into testing with these changes, I feel like the testers will like it too.”
Finally, we had a lot of trouble getting people to test our game. “It has been rather hard for us to get enough testing done for our game. We’ve only had three or four people show up to each session, and we need a total of eighteen testers before we can complete this step. We’re going to have to ramp up the number of sessions we go to, since we want to be done with this step soon.” That was also from week six and seven. Because of COVID, Champlain College wasn’t able to hold it’s normal Game Testing Lab since so many students were remote, plus it simply wouldn’t have been safe to have that many people going from computer to computer. So, we were told to use a system called GRID that our school set up. The GRID was a way to remote access some of the desktops from your own computer. However it was very hard to set up, quite laggy, it often booted you off the network, and it wouldn’t let most people use controllers. Plus, a lot of people didn’t have controllers, even though we were required to get one at the beginning of the semester. To top it off, very few people ever showed up to the testing sessions, so it was really difficult for us to get the number we were required to have by the instructors, and we weren’t supposed to do our own testing by just sending people the build of the game. It made getting good feedback very difficult for us, but thankfully Max was able to compile what we did get into very useful information.
What could I have personally done to help make the game and development process
better:
Two of the biggest things I’ve struggled with this semester was motivation and burnout. Due to not getting to see people in person and needing to work in my bedroom most of the time made it much harder for me to find motivation to do work, especially towards the end of the semester as I got more burnt out from the project since I never even had any breaks like I normally would. Being cooped up in my room for so long on my own pretty much had a big impact on my motivation, and caused me to start burning out much, much sooner than I usually do. I wish that I could have found more motivation to put even more effort into the project, but I couldn’t. Under normal circumstances, I don’t think that this would be an issue, especially since it never has been in the past, but due to the pandemic it’s been a lot harder for me than usual. Even if all of this goes without saying, and we’re in some pretty extraordinary circumstances, I still wish I had been able to put more effort into this project.
One of the things that I wished I had put that effort into was helping to tweak numbers to make combat and movement feel better. With all of the other work that Max had to do, he didn’t have time to work on game feel, and I was also too busy working on the level. But if I hadn’t had to deal with the loss of motivation and burnout previously mentioned, I really would have liked to spend a bit of time working on making the game feel a bit better. I even had a few ideas on how to do it, but I never got around to implementing them since I was focused on the level and on taking care of myself in these strange and tough times.
Finally, one of the biggest pieces of feedback from my team was that they wished I spoke up more during meetings. I tend to be quiet, and I only really speak up when I feel like I have something important to say. As it was, three of our members are rather… loud… so sometimes I wouldn’t always find the opportunity to speak. Usually what I wanted to say would end up getting said anyway, or I would find a time later to say it, but it was still an issue. I got a lot better at it over the course of the semester as I got more comfortable with the team and got to know everyone better, so I was less afraid to cut people off if I needed to in order to be heard. I’m happy with my progress on speaking up a bit more as the semester went on, but it is still something I will need to work on in the future.
What would I do differently if I had to do it again:
Honestly, not very much. This semester has been incredible, despite the world practically shutting down. I am so happy with my team and the game we’ve made so far, and I can’t wait to get to work with them again next semester.
However, there are a few things that I probably would have changed if I had the chance. The first of those being that I would have liked to encourage the team to try to take a few more risks with the game, especially since I have been acting as the product owner and it was my responsibility to decide what got worked on, and when.
One risk that I would have liked to push for a bit harder was making the game multiplayer, and I would have liked to start pushing for it earlier. While our programmer has made some effort to make the game somewhat easy to convert to multiplayer, it’s still going to take a lot of work to get it done. I had a feeling somewhat early on that this game would be better as a multiplayer game, but I never really mentioned it since I knew how much the people on our team didn’t want to make another multiplayer game. However, after feedback from the teachers after our Greenlight presentation, in order for us to move forward with the game we need to convert it to multiplayer. I wish that I had said something earlier about this, and tried to convince people that it would have been a good idea, even if it would have been tough. However, converting it to multiplayer will be a challenge for next semester now, and I think that we will be prepared for it.