What Went Well

One of the things that went well was that we were able to come up with a narravtive for the game very early in the process. While this is not the main part of the process of creating the gameplay, it was important in that it helps us in coming up with the art style and assets that would fit with the story. By having the story clearly established, we were able to easily pick what combat, enemies, environment, and sounds we would make/look for when making the game. In addition, we were able to design different levels with variation in each of them, which allows the player to feel that they are progressing withing the different basements of the game's story. With the different levels, we were also successful in coming up with designs and making the enemies for each levels different. This variation will keep the game visually interesting to the players, and also tell the story of the game, which is a research lab that is experimenting on animals and creating monsters.

What Went Wrong

There were many struggles throughout the process of making this game. First, getting Sourcetree to work and fixing when merge conflicts was challenging, and it could take a lot of time during the work time to figure it out. In addition, we have a lot of problems with the UI layout in the game. Since there are quite a few UI elements and more than 1 person working on it, we have to doing a lot of re-ordering every time one thing was changed in order for all the elements under the canvas to work as intended. Furthermore, the combat of the game was tricky to get it to feel smooth and in a playable state. Since the player combat and the enemy code wasn't finished until later into the process of making the game, we did not have a lot of time to playtest and refine the combat. This resulted in many of the enemies behaving similarly (although they are the boss and minions) as well as the enemies not being able to really do any kind of attack. Another struggle was the animation. Since the sprites wasn't finish until the later stages of making the game, the animation wasn't implemented until the almost final stage of the game. As the animating process took longer than expected, it was difficult to get every animation for every character working in the game, especially for the player character which can move in many directions.

Next Steps

For next steps, one of the things we could improve on would be the combat of the game. With more time, we could refine the combat more by adding more sounds and effects to both the player and the enemies, as well as making the animation and the feel of the the attack smoother. In addition, we could also add animations to the player and the enemies to indicate the different states they are in, as well as more animations in the environment to make the scenes more dynamic and give more visual feedbacks to the player. Moreover, we could add more levels to the game, so that we can elaborate the story more. There could be more levels in between what we already have so that the pacing for the game isn't as arupt as it is right now, and the player can learn with a tutorial level first before climbing up the difficulty curve. There could also be more puzzles within each level which could encourage the player to explore more of the play area, moving from room to room while fighting monsters along the way. This would fit well with the narrative of the game to escape as well. Furthermore, there could be more effects and feedbacks overall, so that the game is as easy to understand as possible, as well as being visually engaging and intersting to play. The feedbacks would be especially necessary if we decided to have more puzzle, because it would prevent the play from getting confused and being stuck at a level in the game.