Third Project - Postmortem

For the past six to seven week a team and I have been working on the development of our trust based game Zurvivor. We were tasked with creating a game based around trust and so Zurvivor focused on the idea of distrust between the players of this game. We found that it was very easy to fall into the trap of developing the game around team work as trust and teamwork contain very similar properties and as trust is more easily established between people than NPCs we chose to make this a multiplayer game, however this did make it easier to accidentally focus on teamwork. Although teamwork is involved I feel the trust aspect remained the central point for the primary mechanics.

Overall I think the game was a complete success, all the core mechanics were in will only one known bug/issue unsolved and there were no complaints during final playtests and exhibition. All the main mechanics were essentially complete by week three even though the documentation was incomplete.Having the game functional so early gave us plenty of time to get the assets and polish in before the final exhibition. The map looked good in the end as did the particle effects and audio.

I feel the game gave the intended results. It allowed players to work in teams or be selfish and stab them in the back, it plays out as intended. I think the level of trust in this game is adequate.

Documentation took forever to complete as things were constantly changing and because things were always fluid it made it difficult to keep a solid idea down. The first week was wasted trying to create a decent idea. I imagined my first one to be pretty entertaining giving players the ability to use each other as bait to allow themselves to escape with their loot and the other players’. I’m not entirely sure what the issue was with that idea, apparently the trust aspect was not strong enough. People liked the next idea however I did not. It was nothing more than a re-skinned Ultimate Werewolf, so I went with the final idea but took aspects of the others along with it, primarily the distrust between players found in the first idea and the voting mechanic of the second.

The art assets were never completed. We had one placeholder animation for the player running and placeholder containers. We got the zombie walk animation online and I ended up completing the final versions of the map and containers myself with help on detailing the map. The art assets were our main concern for roughly three to four weeks.

As usual communication was a major issue, either people weren’t replying or took forever to do so. I also think morality was a big problem, with people getting sick and stressing about other work a lot of the time was taken out of this project. Me being pushy probably didn’t help either, however if I didn’t push to get the work done on time then it would never get done, I still need to learn how to be a more effective team leader.

Although all the mechanics were in by the end I feel like some were lacking or needless. There could have been more for players to do during the day stages and the night votes weren’t really needed. That being said it was not bad work for six weeks and work can still be added in the future.

There was one bug by the end. The safe zone would occasionally not register if a player was inside the zone. This wasn’t a major issue, because we added the “drop box” mechanic, where players drop 70% of their resources in a crate, any lost resources would be within the safe zone. The only time this would be an issue is if it was the last/only player to have resources and their was no food in the team resource pool and that player passed out due to starvation. The only other issue was if players passed out on another floor, the arrow on other players would point outside the border because of the way the levels were laid out.

Before production can commence the documentation needs to be complete as do deadlines, risk management and work delegation. Though the GDD will constantly be changing over the course of the project the HCD needs to be completed before so. I need to learn to either stick to an idea or burn it, too much time was wasted coming up with a decent idea. Communication has gotten a little better, the problem wasn’t the sources used for communication and collaboration but the want to do so.

Mortality was low considering the amount of stress everyone was under. This meant very little work was done over the course of this project, I will need to develop better risk management and take moral into consideration in future projects and figure out a way to deal with it. I also think working with 2D animation had something to do with a lack of moral, the university focuses on 3D animation and so very little know how to efficiently create 2D animations causing them to shy away from it, focusing on work involving 3D animation.