Post-Mortem: Ashton

As of the writing of this, we're approaching 6 months since the release of this game. As the final project of the Game Design 2 class, we put a lot of time and effort into this, and I would say it ended up being a pretty big success. My partner, Alan, did a lot of work creating a protagonist that was not only a ball, but also moved smoothly. He also set up and coded most events, while I focused almost entirely on the art. As I only truly know my side, I will focus on my original scope of the game and how I feel things turned out, as well as hopes for if we ever went back and continued working on the game.

It all started with a prompt: Wild West. Or steampunk. We were originally planning on adding both into the game, but decided against it because we felt a simple wild west desert town would not only suffice, but feel more natural. While cycling through ideas, I brought up the idea of a game where we play as a tumbleweed, and Alan mentioned a playable sphere he had been working on. From there, it clicked, and ideas began flowing out. The town was going to be much more in-depth, with an entire prairie-based minigame for the player to beat, but we ended up keeping things simple for the time frame we had. My original idea  for the visuals were cel-shaded, but once I realized it was more detailed than we were wanting, I opted instead for flat colors and a Post Process Volume, which worked to our benefit greatly. Keeping a simple, low-poly look gave it an incredibly unique aesthetic that I still enjoy looking at. 

If we went back for a second iteration, there are quite a few changes we would make. One obvious one is making the duel more threatening, maybe adding npc animations and actual knockback to increase the stakes. Another thing is just generally increasing the difficulty of each puzzle, the only ones that felt good to me were the watertower and the mineshaft, and even then I would still change them. The mineshaft I would make longer as it felt too short, and I would add a physics-based puzzle for the keys. Maybe the biggest (and most egregious) error in the game is that there is no win screen, not even a win state. If you return all items to their rightful owners, nothing happens. We would add in a victory screen at the very least, but what I think would be more fun for the player would be an entire platforming segment. A final small change I would make is more ways for the player to mess around and skip intended gameplay puzzles. One of my favorite things to do was watch other people play the game, as they would find new skips that I had never even thought possible. One player discovered that you could skip the entire mineshaft by climbing onto the rocks on top of it. Another player got onto the highest point of the map and attempted to scale the cliffs and go out of bounds, which he did accomplish after 20 minutes. I want to create more of these ways players can use the freedoms of the movement to exploit the game, as it creates an incredibly accomplished feeling in the player once they finally pull of their difficult stunt.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed the process of creating this game, and I thank everyone who I worked with on it. Alan did absolutely excellent on creating near seamless movement, Nolan's voices for the characters were always fun to hear, and Chase's music was insanely good, I remember listening to it while I was working on the game just because it made my ears feel nice.