Postmortem

Postmortem

The Scrappy Misfits, a cast of 6 strangers banding together to create “Bermit the Frog: Purge All Evil”, a 2D platformer on the game jam theme of "purge and frog". We came together purely for the love of video game development. Our team was comprised of two producers, three Unity engineers, one Unreal engineer, six game designers, two graphics designers, and one sound engineer (some people wore multiple hats). We met at 11:00 am and developed this game until 11:00 pm.

What went right?

1. Amazing spirit and cohesive team

We spent under one hour brainstorming all the ideas we could think of around the theme “purge and frog”. The team was in high spirits and everyone was contributing various ideas. There was, strangely, few disagreements to the direction the game should go. The brainstorm part was my favorite as it was also a way to get to know each other's personalities/interests and I got to hear input from everyone; a big advantage of being a small group.

2. Everyone contributed game's focus

I may have encouraged the teammates to brainstorm longer than they may have wanted to but I feel this was a good decision as we not only heard more ideas from the initially quieter teammates but it also changed the game’s overall direction to something more original and creative. Had we gone with our original idea of the annual-purge-of-frog-lawlessness, it would have been a cross between GTA and SmashTV. Sounds amazing right? We were all excited about it but given the time restraints, we would have needed to cut many features and be unable to meet this crossroad. Also, since it was our first idea, it was less original and as it turns out, it would have held similarities to two other games at the event.

3. Finished product

Going into this, our main goal was to have something finished to turn in. This game was the only submission with all of the following:  title screen menu, a storyboard intro, one game level, and an ending.

4. Productivity

The teams productivity was off-the-charts-great. I think this was in part because everyone was busy with something. We had a guy with zero technical skill but he had designed for additional enemies and level themes. Our Unreal expert had level design down-pat. Our artist had great leeway to design all the characters. Her friend got the animations working seamlessly and the main character controller. Our main programmer worked his butt off for, I think, 698/881 lines of code and animated the tongue attack too.

What went wrong?

1. Learning as we go

It feels like everyone made large contributions to the game except me. I made the mistake of trying to implement features I've never done before. Using tile palettes without tiles or writing the code for procedural map generation. I could not figure it out. I got close but it never stopped generating so we could not use it. I learned, after the event, that the platform was cloning; so it was one object making 10 copies of itself and each of its copies were making 10 copies of itself. Such an obvious error in programming logic, I wish I could have figured this out day of though. I'm disappointed with my failed attempts but from this experience, I learned I am not a fast learner and need to go into future projects with this in mind.

2. Collaboration tools

Getting the collaboration tools was a bit of a hassle as it took development time away from us. In retrospect, it was redundant to use both Discord and Google Drive for a one day/local event. For our  game engine, I never experienced the 'collaborate' feature built into Unity. An unexpected problem arose, as I learned (after the event), that my version of Unity (2018.1 rather than the latest 2018.2) has a bug in the interface, which prevents clicking and therefore prevents pushing my contributions. The big takeaway from this is simply to make sure you use the most updated version of all your tools. I also drew collision lines on top of the drawn map from another teammate but I could not push it to the build due to the compatibility issue in Unity I mentioned earlier. At this point, I had to step away from Unity and figure out how else I could help.

3. Unused talent

We had a professional engineer on our team but we were unable to use his skills as we used Unity/C# rather than his knowledge of Unreal/C++. It was a waste of talent but at least he had fun practicing the art which would become our level features.

4. Programmers dilemma

Despite having a phenomenal minimum viable product (MVP), we nevertheless experienced crunch because we continued to add features once the MVP was nearly completed. If we were to meet up for more development, we can easily take this game forward and improve with the large plethora of ideas we brainstormed at the start of development. I suppose it would be unfair to say we all experienced crunch as the crunch was mostly on our one experienced programmer, Thomas. I think one of the difficulties of being a programmer is when the not-a-programmer asks, "can you do XYZ feature?" over and over again. The programmer will of course say "yes" to be challenged and contributing; but eventually the not-a-programmer starts saying "Do XYZ" when time becomes constrained. It is my guess that out of all of us, he left the event feeling the most exhausted. I think, in the future, we should account for mishaps/bugs and have a build ready to deliver by a specific deadline. For an event like this, perhaps one to two hours before the end? Then, should time allow, we allow the extra features to be implemented as the teammates want to strive for in subsequent versions. That way, nothing is forced and if the new features break anything, we nevertheless have a viable product to deliver by rolling back versions.

Final Comments

A day later, I asked my teammates for a comment and the tools they used.

Tara Nguyen: "I don't have much to comment on but I thought we did a great job, had fun, and worked well together I used Procreate to draw the sprites and story scenes."

Thomas Case: "Same as Tara, nothing really extra to say. We were pretty much all newcomers and I'm really proud of our game. I had a great time and hope to see everyone at more events!"

Chris Nguyen: "Comment: my team was fucking rad, fun, and flexible. Tools: OneNote and too many ideas."

Data Box:

Developer

• Scrappy Misfits
  • Thomas Case - Producer / Programmer / Designer
  • Chris Nguyen - Game Designer
  • Tara Nguyen - Character Artist / Designer
  • Me (Chris Zapata) - Producer / Sound / Designer
  • Kristi ??? - Animator / Programmer / Designer
  • Jared ??? - Level Designer / Designer

Release Date

• July 15th, 2018

Platforms:

• Windows

Number of Developers

• 6

Length of Development

• 12 hours
• July 15, 2018

Budget

• $0

Lines of Code

      881 Lines of Written Code

Development Tools

• Unity 3D
• Procreate
• Photoshop
• Google Drive
• Discord
• OneNote