Postmortem

Success:

We believe that for emotional games, a good backstory lays the foundation for its success. This is something I think we did successfully, by emphasizing that this is the beginning of a brave man's trial, and gradually leading the player to solve the mystery on this character. We got a lot of positive feedback this way during the player testing process.

In terms of visual aspects, we have achieved a uniformity of style. A lowpoly style was used to make the dreamlike scene engaging. Making this work well with the narrative part.

The character movements and sound effects have been well thought out and matched. Considering the player's course of action and the way they trigger clues, each action has a corresponding sound effect, which will also fully submerge our players into the game world.

Challenges:

Our complex storyline led to a high demand for the logical part of the code, and we made trade-offs between cutting and keeping the game's plot. We then simplified the code to the best of our ability and kept the game running smoothly.

Because there is a lot of background music and trigger music in the game it is also important to balance the music, which requires us to put ourselves in the player's shoes and audition the various sound effects so that they can be balanced.

Learned:

As we worked together we learned the process of good teamwork, for example Isabella and I worked together to conceptualize the storyline and flow of the characters, then she wrote the script for our game, as well as created the cover of the journal. During her creation, I wrote the code based on the plot and quest logic, as well as utilizing blank pages for the UI parts.

I also learned that the camera moves as needed for the shot, giving close-ups of the target object so that it can give the player a hint. During the code part I learned to make objects active when needed and hidden when not needed. There are also transitions for multiple scenes and trigger conditions for buttons.

Next Step:

As our Prof. John said. Currently players lack the initiative to play the game, they just see the quests and walk over to interact with them. Although we want to simplify this game, there are actually a lot of areas that need to be improved, such as roadblocks and hint clues to make it less easy for the player to do the quest. Also, the game scenarios could be optimized and the player should know why this mission takes place in such a scenario.