Devlog 2 - Postmortem

Postmortem

Successes:

One aspect our game was able to successfully achieve was the game feel of the player. We were able to incorporate parallax scrolling and create our own background to enhance the experience. A large part of the game involved different power ups of the player. To ensure the player was aware of the different power states, we focused on the visual design of the game by creating separate sprites for each power-up. We also created an informative pop-up that detailed what kind of power-up the player obtained for a smoother game feel. We also successfully spawned obstacles, carrots, power ups, and enemies, and scaled the timing and distance between spawns based on the player’s score.

Challenges:

While developing the game, one of the challenges our team faced were merge conflicts. Since our game was an endless runner, all the game mechanics existed within a single scene, which also meant that multiple people would be working on the same scene. When we ran into a minor merge conflict, we were able to fix the issue quickly and resolved the issue by communicating with each other and informing the team when someone would be working on the project before making any major changes.

Another challenge was ensuring a smooth difficulty curve. To address this, we ensured that the speed of the obstacles and enemies were slow enough in the beginning, which served as a tutorial phase to get the player used to the controls. As the game progressed, we steadily increased the speed of the enemies and obstacles respawning to make the game more challenging. 

Executing the spawns was also challenging because the objects could not be spawned too far away from or too close to each other. The timing for each spawn was complicated because certain objects, such as the laser bunnies and missile bunnies, had animations that needed to be accounted for. As the game progresses, to prevent an overwhelming amount of obstacles from being spawned during a short amount of time, a cap was set for the minimum amount of time between spawns. Furthermore, other obstacles and enemies could not be spawned while the laser bunnies were active, so their spawns had to be paused.

What you learned:

We learned how to create an endless runner that continuously spawns objects. We were able to polish our technical skills in game design by scaling the difficulty of the game as time progresses and the player travels more distance, and having different enemies' attacks to make the game more challenging for the player. In addition, we also incorporated a shop feature that allowed players to upgrade their power-ups in order to motivate them to continue playing the game. 

Possible future revisions:

A future addition to the game would be to increase the variety of obstacles and enemy attacks. Furthermore, we would also give the player more unique power ups (e.g. temporarily increasing the value of the carrots) since the player currently only has 3 power ups. A wider variety of trails could be available for players to purchase in the future. This would add more depth to the game design and offer players a distinct gameplay experience each time they play.  We would also add a pause button and a moving effect to the ground.