Successes

There are some very successful aspects that we were able to achieved during the product process of this game. The first success was being able to create a simple fighting mechanic between the player and the ghosts. Although we have several types of ghosts as the enemies, because their behaviors were all variations of the same code, creating the shooting mechanic for the different ghosts went without any problems. In addition, programming the play interactions of tapping, holding, and swiping also went fairly well and under the estimated time. This allowed us to have more time working on refining and fixing bugs for the problems that have surfaced instead. In addition, the shooting mechanic, along with the crosshair in the middle of the screen, seemed to be straightforward enough that many playtesters were able to understand and learn how to attack the ghosts right away. Initially, we were torn between keeping the bullets shooting only from the center of the screen or having them shoot from the location where the screen is tapped. After several playtests, we decided to keep our initial mechanic where the bullets can only be shot from the middle of the screen. This way, the players will be encouraged to move the device around to aim rather than staying in the same place all the time. By moving the phone around, the players can learn that they can dodge the ghosts' bullets by moving around physically as well. Moreover, the simplicity of the game that we have, both in the interactions as well as the visual environment seemed to make the game more easily-understandable to new players as well. Since there's only 4 types of actions the players can do (and 2 only work at certain times in the game), the players were able to memorize how to attack fairly quickly and avoid any confusion. As for the assets, we were able to create successful ghosts in which can be easily spotted by the players through the use of unatural neon colors to contrast with the background of the real world. Lastly, at the playtests, we were successful in structuring the game in a way that encourages the players to walk around. When the ghosts spawn, many players react by walking closer for a better aim, or moving away in order to dodge bullets, all of which were something we intended for it to happen. Many players would walk around in order to find more ghosts as well. 

Struggles

While there were many successes, we also faced many struggles throughout the process of making this project as well. The main struggle was figuring out how the geolocation works and how to spawn the ghosts according to those coordinates. I would say that figuring out the geolocation took us 1/4 of the time we have on the project. Since this a completely new thing to code for us, we ran into many bugs while working with using the GPS and spawning the ghosts. One of the problem was figuring out the actual range of the latitude and the longiutude in which to spawn the ghost in, and because the numbers were extremely small, we had to go back and forth a lot, figuring out which amount is small enough that all of the intended spawing location would not overlap. Initially, we used the coordinates provided by Google Maps. However, when actually testing out the game, the coordinates we got were off. As a result, we have to go to actual location to take the coordinates manually to improve the accuracy of the game. Also, when we went to show our game at WonderVIlle (12/06/19), we ran into a problem where the ghosts took very long to spawn even when the player was right at the middle of the location, which was a problem we never encountered at Union Squre. Although this spawning delay didn't affect our final version of the game since it is not intended to be played at WonderVille, it still affected the number of playtesters we were able to get to test the game since one session took a lot longer than we have anticipated. Another struggle we faced was the UI problems. First, the UI indicating when the player should swipe to exorcise would not work, which affected the player's experience directly since it was the only indication we had to show the players what they have to do to proceed with the game. In addition, the map we had and some of the other UIs were not working properly in the game, like not showing up on the screen, We were able to fix this later with re-ordering all the different UIs we have in the game. Moreover, the health and power of the player in the game were not corresponding to the values we have set initially, which became a problem for using the charged attack since the attack uses the power which was not displaying correctly. With the many struggles regarding the UI, which came in at the later half stage of making the game, we were unable to spend more time refining the in-game feedbacks to enhance the players' experience. Another struggle was the scaling confusion we have when creating the game in Unity vs. building the game to test it out on the phone. The objects in Unity would look very small in comparison to on the phone's screen where it is way too big. While the fix for the this problem was to simply scale everything down, it still took a lot of time for use to go back and forth between building and scaling the ghosts many times before we would reach the intended sizes.

Next Steps

1. Firstly, the next steps for the future iteration would be to add animations to the ghosts. This would make the game become more visually interesting. More importantly, the different states of the ghost can be conveyed through the use of animation in order to the players to understand when they can exorcise the ghost or when they should dodge because the ghost is going to attack. 
2. This leads to also adding more feedbacks for the future iteration as well, like a meta UI in which indicate that the player is getting close to dying or that the player's power increasing. 
3. We could also implenent the morality concept in which we had initially, where the players should help the kind ghosts move on while only exorcising the evil ghosts. By doing the opposite, the player's morality will decreases. This would in-turn affect the players abilities to attacks, for example the players will get different power ups depending on whether they are on the good or the bad side of the morality bar.
4. In addition, adding more types of ghosts which spawn in specific areas can be something we can implement into the game in the future. More variations of the ghost will encourage the players to exlpore more and keep coming back to play the game.
5. Morever, with more ghosts, we can have a log system to keep track of the exorcised ghosts in the game. This can be an additional feature in which provide more information on the ghosts. It can also be a way to give players agency to pick their own objectives. For example, if they excorcised a certain number of a certain king of ghosts, they can get a special power.
6. We could also extend the gameplay period to be longer by make the game have generative levels which changes every time or gets more difficult as the player's progresses into the game. This could also lead to having more play areas with varying difficulties, so that the stronger players will go to a certain areas to play, while beginners will go to another areas.

Reflection

Since this is the first AR project we've worked on, we got to learned many things, especially how to structure an AR game and how to make an effective UI on a phone screen which is much smaller than the computer screen. We also learned how to cut features while still keeping the core experience of the game; due to time constraints, we decided to significantly decrease the types of ghosts and the spawn points, but we also decided to have the original attack mechanic between the player and the ghosts in the game, keeping it fairly simple. Personally, I also learned how to manage a team and how to divide the workload in between the team. Although initially we didn't have a team manager, I decided to keep tracks of all the tasks we have left and update it daily while talking to the other members and checking how they are doing with their part of the works so that we can finish the final version of the game on time.