Post Mortem

Main Struggles

My main struggle revolves around designing the difficulty level or each levels, which involves designing the wave patterns, the number of enemies, and controlling the power of the player character. I was struggling to find the right spot for the difficulty levels that feel both challenging but playable, along with having the difficulty increases as the level progresses. While my first iteration was too easy, the second became too hard, and this repeats over again for later iterations. It was difficult to work on the diffuculty leveling when I also found more bugs every time I change the enemy patterns, for example the intervals between each were multiplied and ended up being a long wait. In addition, I spent around 70% of my time working on the mechanic and difficulty levels, until there was a time that I had to stop in order to spare some time to work on the aesthetic and visual feedbacks for the game as well.

As I mentioned before, there were several bugs that popped up every time I change something with the difficulty levels. This includes bugs in the follower behavior, in which they spawned more than I intended due to coding redundancy. In addition, I had a lot of bugs when creating the wave patterns and had to spend time fixing them before moving onto work on the difficulty level. The boss I have for the last level also took a while to get it to work, which then, has to be tested and tweaked for feel of the difficulty, which led back to my main struggle of level design. 

Main Triumphs

One of the things I would considered succesful is that the game has a cohesive and cartoony style of art, as I intended it to be. The player and its followers are easily distinguishable from the the enemies due to the different color palettes. I was also able to draw all the sprites for all the different characters that I had intended and gave each of them basic animations. I would considered this fairly simple task a triumph since this is the first time I completely created all of the art for a 2D game. In addition, I think that the character design fits with my theme and they were clear enough in communicating what they are.

Next Steps

Definitely, I think the difficulty level for the levels can be further improved, and the best way to do that would be to keep doing more playtesting and iterating. As for other improvements, I think that having even more visual and sound feedbacks would further enhance the feel of the game, for example a UI that pops up every time a new wave is coming. This would also help to fix the problem I had with the waves interval being too long. In addition, a UI that would communicate how many of the follower cells the player have collected would help with the gameplay as well. 

Moreover, I think that adding different music to each levels, as well as different background art would help in giving the game a narrative. Since I have the final boss be a brain, the different levels could different organs in which the player have to take over first in order to infect the whole body. This would add oppurtunity for more story, interesting layout design for different levels, as well as power ups, items, and enemies that are exclusive to each level.