Postmortem

Successes

A large success was the ability of our group to work together. Everyone communicated well together and presented the work on schedule. We were able to decide on group decisions without any conflict and everyone always responded in a timely manner. Each member joined group meetings when one was necessary as well. 

Another success of our game was bringing about the vision that we had. We were able to bring about the Metroid vibes and play style in our own way and make a fun game to play. The movement was properly implemented and complimented the level designs well. Each enemy was capable of patrolling their own platforms, die when shot, and was able to attack the player. The artwork was cohesive, mixed well, and created an atmosphere that was in line with our vision for the game. 

 For possible future revisions, we can work on creating a whole separate boss level for our boss, introducing more character types, building upon the maps to make them longer, adding collectibles and hidden doorways/paths, and adding angle shooting to our game. Overall this game was really fun to make and we all had a blast.

Challenges

However, there were challenges that we had to overcome. 

One of the challenges we faced was with the moving platforms and how the player interacted with them. The moving platforms had to be placed in ways where the players can easily jump to them. We also had to make the platforms move to intended locations and their movement speed was slow enough for the player to jump on, but also fast enough to provide players a challenge to time their jumps.

Another challenge was sprite and tile size scaling. As new sprites were being pushed into the project, we had trouble keeping up with properly scaling them into an even proportion where they were not too large or too small. Unity splicing sometimes resulted in incorrect proportional sizes, which lead to animations being jarring and out of sync. It took longer than planned to get everything to mesh together. 

Another key challenge was just programming in general. As more features were added, bugs would follow. Refining our game to resolve bugs definitely took longer than expected, and was a large aspect of our final development process.

What We Learned

While building this platformer game, we learned how to make sprites and animation, learned how to do tile mapping and how to insert them as background for the game.  Cinemachine was another thing we learned while trying to give that Metroid feel to our game. Adding controller compatibility for our game was new as we only had keyboard/mouse support during most of our development process. Learning how to implement a wall jump was another key thing we learned. Overall, creating this game helped us learn a lot more about Unity, its tools, and how to properly develop a game from start to finish.

Future Revisions

For future revisions, we plan on adding more enemy types. The sprite designs have already been developed but due to time, we were not able to program them to be added to the game. For instance, we have a security drone enemy design ready, but currently not implemented. In terms of the player, we plan on adding angled aiming so the player is able to shoot slightly up or slightly down, giving the player more versatility when combating levels. We would also redesign certain levels to help compliment angled aiming. Animations are a large aspect of the game that we want to revise. For instance, we do not have a wall jump animation, so the player does not know when they are in the wall jumping phase. We also plan on adding death animations to the player and also damaged animations. One final revision would definitely be the final boss. We felt it was lackluster in terms of gameplay and plan on improving the experience.