Post-Mortem: It's a Blob

Introduction

In this Post-mortem, I’ll discuss about the game project that myself and peer’s did for an assignment that we had to do as well as this post-mortem. It’s a Blob is a Uni student project and is also the first one that we have done together and made publicly available.

Things that Worked

Aesthetics and Mechanics

The aesthetics of It’s a Blob was something that went well especially for having to make them within 13 weeks and the current skill level of our team which varied. We were able to make them through Photoshop and then import them into unity. Thankfully this didn't take too much time and helped us with time, another thing that we did before fully building the game was making sure the mechanics of the game worked to some degree. With what we had and the time we also had, this wasn't too hard. We did find some difficulty but ultimately surpassed the problems and made it work in our built game.

The Idea

Originally our idea for our project was going to be a 2D side scroller that involved climbing fences. However our team thought that it would be to easy to make so instead we scrapped this and talked further about what we could make. With the influence of Chips Challenge and Crash Bandicoot we made a 2D puzzle game that was fun but had a little bit of challenge to it as well. So we ended up coming up with a blob moving through the levels within our game collecting friendly blobs and avoiding obstacles.

Research, Feedback and Guidance

Before actually making It’s a Blob we knew we needed to do some research. First to see if anyone had made the game before to make sure we didn't break any copyright rights, as well as making sure some of the coding worked as well and finding out how to do some of the code that we needed to game what we wanted within the game as this was our first proper game we made. While making It’s a Blob we also had some guidance from a lecturer. So we were being pushed a little in the right direction so that we could build the game within the 13 weeks we had. As with the guidance, we found this to be extremely useful when we had a alpha that was able to be played by others without being uploaded to the internet. From this we discovered that when people are given freedom to explore but also having something next to them, players would prefer to go ahead and explore. Not only that but from the feedback we were able to change some of the layout of the levels of It’s a Blob and make them look better and more interesting as well as forcing the player to take the intended path that we wanted by restricting were they could go and explore.

Things that Didn't Work

Attendance

Attendance was something that was a little hard to manage with some of us having personal reasons for not coming in and helping to work together in making It’s a Blob. This lead to some other members having to take and fill in the role of others for more than one occasion. This was one problem that didn't help at all especially for our main art member not being there. This lead to some of the art assets that he made not being used and other art assets that were made without our art member being used instead so It’s a Blob looked more basic.

Time Restraints

With the time restraints that we all had, having other classes as well as other assignments that needed to be done, this lead to some stressful situations. Unfortunately some of us had to move and not have internet while others were going through some much more severe cases. In saying that, we still all tried our best to fulfill our goals and also be on time with our work so that we could get a polished game up online.

Skills

Everyone’s skills was another thing that was a problem, we all knew that we weren't terribly good as we just learnt some of the necessary things for Unity. Some of us even got to use Photoshop for making either the buttons or levels but again with some of us we weren't terribly good with it except for one of our team members. So this lead to some of the aesthetics of the game to be somewhat basic because we weren't able to access more of the art assets. Some of us even had problems with the coding trying to get things to work and how to set it up. Thankfully we had some guidance to get things working as we continued working on the game.

Conclusion

So in the end we were able to resolve the problems and issues we had while making It’s a Blob with the guidance and research we did. Not only that but we all believed that for our first game that we all made as Students of Game Design we are all happy about it and agree that it’s done well without current skill level we are at right now. It was fun making it and designing some of the levels as well as the buttons for the aesthetics. It’s also really great to see that people have actually seen and even downloaded the game a couple of times as well.

It’s a Blob:

https://lazareth13.itch.io/its-a-blob