Week 10 & 11 - Finishing Up

For the final 2 weeks I worked on just polishing the game and fixing game breaking bugs. Initially I planned on only working 10 weeks but by the end of week 10 the game felt incomplete. Though it was functional and fun, it still had too many rough edges and it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. This led me to work an extra week focused on very specific changes. There weren’t that many changes nor were these very complex as we didn’t have the time for that. Instead, we focused on the changes that would add the most while costing the least.

The first change we made was adding paintings to the house. Though it sounds simple, this change made the house feel like a real place, like someone actually personalized the space. For this change I looked at paintings by Colombians and made pixel art versions of them. I also used some of my own artwork, edited as well to fit the rest of the paintings.

The next change that added a lot was polishing the UI. This meant changing the font, removing default button designs and in general implementing a personalized UI that fitted the game. This was mostly done by my partner who has more experience working with UX/UI. This made the game look like an actual finished product as it is present in the whole game, thus transversally making it better.

I also made many small fixes to the game, like adding some extra light to parts that were too dark, making the enemy FoV a bit more eye-catching, fixing the position of objects that weren’t where they should be, etc. Though simple in principle, the fact that there were so many small aspects to be fixed everywhere made it very mentally taxing and hard to keep up with what was done.

A particularly simple change that we didn’t realize was missing until we thought it really hard was adding faces to the enemies. We had grown used to them not having faces which made it really hard to realize just how strange it actually was. In the end the faces were very simple to draw and implement and added a lot of personality to the enemies.

Another change that was made at the end was reducing the difficulty in the tutorial for the sleepy enemies. To be honest I had felt that this level was too much of a spike in difficulty but didn’t work on it because I remember liking the challenge after first making it. Now, after I had been able to test it with other players and also clearly defined the experience as a whole with all the other levels I couldn’t deny that the difficulty needed to be toned down in this level.

Now that this project has ended I’m able to realize just how much I learned from it. For once, the change in level design objective that I had at the beginning teached me that I still need more experience to execute like an engaging interconnected game developed from the ground up. I won’t stop aiming high, but now I know that I need to study and practice several fundamentals. I’ll do this by continuing making personal projects, each one achieving a bit more than the one before.

It also made me realize my limitations in regards to 3D Modeling and general use of Unreal Engine. Though I can use both softwares, I’m nowhere near the level of mastery I thought I was. I plan to start studying both softwares while I plan what my next project will be. I don’t want to keep losing time because I need to relearn how to use these tools each time I start a new project.

Finally, working on my degree project made me look back on all the failed projects I made before and what these had in common. I had to acknowledge that I have always over-designed from the start. Though I have become better at not doing this, it is still an issue that affected my development this last 11 weeks. I added more features than what I actually needed for the core experience and everything was more interconnected than what I had realized due to the number of parts that composed the game. This meant that changing one thing would affect another that I hadn’t intended to. It wasn’t as bad as with other projects as I managed to finish this one in a way I feel satisfied with, but it still was an issue. This realization brought me back to earth and made me humble. I’ll keep this in my mind from now on as I think being able to make the most difference with the least amount of features is a mark of a great game designer, be it indie or AAA.