VIRION Postmortem

What Went Right?
VIRION looks really crisp and runs exactly how we wanted it to. All the bugs we came across have been fixed and the scope was met as well as a few of the desirable's. We all worked really hard and got a lot done early giving us more time to polish and create new maps. Practically everyone who played VIRION liked it, more than I was expecting, which has given us the motivation to continue working on it.

The models all follow the same sharp design and fit the computer virus theme as does the hexagon tile grid and colour palette. All in all this is a game we are proud of creating.

Even though level design was mostly focused on what looks cool rather than game play, we did gain a lot of knowledge from it.

We spent around a week on paper play testing and it was very useful. Because our game could be played as a physical board game it was a lot easier to create a paper play test. We managed to specify the rules and the unit abilities because of the play test.

What Went Wrong?
Our original idea was broken and we ended up scrapping most of it on the day of the pitch. Luckily there were a few salvageable aspects that we carried on to the current design and VIRION turned out better than I imagined.

Communication could have gone a lot better. The only time we really had meetings was during classes and the few times we met up on Skype. We talked a lot on Facebook but not as the entire group, most of the time it was just two to three of us on at any given time. Communication was our weakest point and is something we need to fix for future projects.

Documentation was not kept up to date. This was because no one wanted to write it and after a while it lost its usefulness.

Level design wasn't very efficient, yes we made a lot of maps but we didn't think about overall gameplay when designing them. When selecting the final three (or so) maps we pretty much only considered which ones looked cool. In the future we need to take gameplay, player stories, and strategies into consideration.

Future Changes
We need to move away from Facebook and find new alternatives to discuss and hold meetings. Using Skype was a good start but there were very few Skype meetings. We should allocate more time each day for meetings on Skype or other means.

In order to keep documents up to date we could have those focusing on particular aspects of the game work on those parts of the documents.

There is a lot we need to consider when designing the levels rather than aesthetics alone. Creating level design documents before creating the levels will be really useful in designing more elaborate and entertaining maps.