Overall I am very pleased with the final outcome of our game. It is something I’m sure everyone within my group is proud of and should take pride in. Everything came together as one big cohesive, enjoyable and visually compelling finalised vertical slice of a game.
At first, taking on a role that was more focused on coding felt quite overwhelming. It was a big shift for me, but I feel like I managed to learn and complete everything to the best of my ability, even with the challenges that came from not being able to communicate regularly with my team. Looking back, I now realise that the lack of communication later in the project was mostly on my end. Not being able to attend most sessions and speak with my teammates in person really affected the overall process and making it more difficult.
One major issue we ran into was confusion around who was responsible for creating the UI and mechanics. Although we had a clear plan from the beginning, things still got mixed up. Some of my work was completely overlooked or taken over rather rapidly In terms of building the UI in game, even after I’d shared updates and explained that I was creating the menu and learning how to code so it might take a couple of weeks, only to see days later someone else had implemented their rendition into the project. It felt disheartening, especially after communicating that I was actively working on these aspects though our discord. I am happy that i still managed to implement a large majority of the design work i had done and that my initial mechanical tweaks were considered within the gameplay. Honestly just frustrated with how it felt as though even though I had learnt how to and made my own code especially in regards to the menu, title screen and smaller UI elements, a large portion of that would not end up in our game.
Honestly, this project has had its fair share of ups and downs. At the start of this project as with any I created a risk analysis, but I never expected to be dealing with so many doctors and hospital appointments. It’s not something I usually talk about in my work, but it ended up having a real impact physically, mentally, and in terms of how much I could contribute in person, especially toward the middle and end of the project. While it’s been tough, I think it’s important to reflect on how these unexpected challenges affected my workflow, and what I can learn from that moving forward.
Despite all of this I am so pleased with the final outcome of our game, and everybody worked well together. I just wish we managed to have more frequent discussions of what is being done within our discord to avoid confusions such as the ones I had very frequently experienced during the development of the game.