Sunday, December 2, 2018

Udder Nonsense Postmortum

Hey guys, Adam here giving the postmortem for Udder Nonsense.
What Worked
- The group all understood their roles, and despite losing a team member in the very first week, we managed to recover.
- We had a designated person for each area of art, so all of the animations felt similar and didn't feel too jarringly different from one another for example.
- Met up at least once a week, which made sure every member of the group was able to stay on track, and made sure consistent progress was made.
- The core mechanics were pinned down early on, allowing us to provide a decent amount of polish to our game.
- Similarly, the visual style was settled within the first 3 weeks, allowing the visuals to be finished very quickly, and allowed the gameplay to take more of a focus.
- No real leader to the group meant that everyone's contributions were equally important, and everyone was listened to.
- GIT was fantastic, and everyone picked it up quickly, allowing us to share builds with ease.
- The blog was updated frequently, allowing us to very easily check back on previous work, and forcing us to have something to show often.
What Didn’t Work
- Our sound student did no work after our first meeting, and told us he would be unable to help us just before the final in class session.
- We had a few issues with team members, leading to small disputes towards the middle of the term.
- Once the semester ended, meetups were far less frequent, often only being a Discord call once per couple of weeks, or just messages over Facebook.
- Several injuries and illnesses lead to work being postponed, or being pushed aside completely towards the second half of the semester.
- We had some issues with builds being named poorly, often named by the person who first built them, making them hard to find, and making testing often a waste of time when the wrong build had been used.
- We only had one person who had any skill in coding, and as such, struggled to make any changes to mechanics when they weren't around.
What We Would Do Differently Next Time
- Make sure to quash any problems within group members very early on.
- Having everyone in the group learn some coding, so that simple issues could be fixed by the person who found them.
- Force ourselves to meet up more after the end of the semester, or at least keep in touch more than we did.
Despite all the issues, the game faced, we're now at the point where the portion of this journey with Murdoch University has come to a close. I would just like to thank my team members for helping to make Udder Nonsense as fantastic as it turned out. Whether this is the end of this journey, or if it keeps going on, it's been fantastic, and we have all learned so much.
Thanks again guys!
Adam.