State of the game as of 21/04/2020
Postmortem & Takeaways
Beta ... that sweet time when everything is either on fire or trudging along like clockwork ... Who am I kidding, it never perfect!
But at least we are making steady progress, so the fire has for the most part died out.
Almost all of the art has been implemented, save for the Enemy characters, some more animations and a few pieces of UI art. None of those things will take a long time to actually implement into the game, so as long as they are finished on time, we should be good to go for Gold.
The Designers have also made a lot of changes to the levels, so they look a lot more interesting and are fully playable to boot. There are a few kinks in regards to enemy spawning that we'll need to iron out, but our other programmers are already working with design on that.
That said, the biggest problems we have besides art are lighting issues - when the level's lighting gets built it makes things look worse and even completely breaks one of the textures!
I'm not sure what is causing this issue, but will be focusing primarily on that for the last week, as well as helping out teammates with bugs and navigating the project (it's not terrible, but far from perfect in terms of asset organisation and naming).
Time for the postmortem. As any other postmortem, I will be talking about what went well, what didn't and what could be done better in the future.
In terms of what went well, I'd say that the team has been maintaining an overall enthusiastic and positive atmosphere during the time we were in Montreal. This has slipped somewhat after going remote, but we haven't had any fights or anything like that. I think that the size of the team has also worked in our favor this time as well, as we were able to effectively split the majority of the tasks fairly evenly. Finally, our ability to come up with the game's core setting and gameplay elements early on, meant that there were no drastic pivots midway through work that would force us to restart from 0.
As for what didn't work as well, I have to put most of the blame on a combination of factors that mostly stem from our new favorite virus. Having to go remote, in my opinion, had a big impact on the team's overall dynamic and frequency of communication (which wasn't helped by the fact that I ended up 6 hours ahead of everyone). These effects were somewhat exacerbated by the slip in performance of our producer as well as persisting trouble with Unreal Engine. Unreal should be mentioned separately, as I think we were a bit too enthusiastic about picking it as out engine, when only I and our artists had any experience in it whatsoever (not to mention the fact that the artists never actually went into the project to this day). We should have been more cautious and spent more time understanding and researching the engine, rather than trying to figure things out on the fly; which for me lead to a full re-write of the combat system which became a tangled mess of blueprints from multiple different tutorials.
So the main takeaways that I have from working on Toybox are:
Always research the engine you are working in and how to best approach it, as well as what the best resources are available for it. For Unreal, that would manifest in picking a version that was a few behind the most recent one, which means that it's already stable and has been released long enough for help and tutorials to be readily available
Working remotely is hard, so steps need to be taken to create and maintain disciple and a clear work structure - regular check-ins using voice, etc.
When working remotely updates need to be as frequent as possible, so that the rest of the team is aware of any delays or issues that have arisen
Art needs to be made priority n.1, so that there is plenty of time to finish everything and go back and make changes if they are necessary
That about does it for now, but I'll be back in August with another project to do.
And this one will be even bigger.
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