Overall, our project was a success. We received a lot of praise across the board during Technigala from visitors. It was eye-catching to our target audience, children, while still being fun for college students and other adults.
Validation
We successfully made a game that children enjoyed playing. It was extremely enjoyable to watch people of all ages from 5 years old to 50+-year-old professors experience a sense of childlike joy when something unexpected happened.
Unfortunately, we could not upload the finalized version of the game to itch.io until after Technigala because we continued to tweak and retweak the game until everyone was 100% satisfied with the end product. Now, we can analyze the results of how many people downloaded the game. Countless people that were not at Technigala have voiced an interest in being able to play the game in one form or another. We look forward to being able to continue to share the game with people in the future.
Potential Next Steps
Our next steps would be to continue to polish the presentation of the game. Having a better way to display controls is a priority, as we need to handle different screen sizes.
Next, adding new game modes to keep players coming back. We have a good structure to place them in, without having to do a large restructuring of the code. Breaking the setup area into a separate hub world means we can switch scenes to any game mode we create.
As a long-term goal, adding online multiplayer would be a nice addition. Unity does have capabilities to support online multiplayer, but looking into Steam's specific architecture would be most appealing.
Final Takeaways
We learned a great deal about the process of video game development. Because we used a physics-based engine, the same inputs can result in wildly different results compared to an animation engine which results in the same output given the same input. Consequently, finding and fixing minor bugs was a slight issue. It is very easy to do something never done before which would slightly glitch the engine and result in unwanted behavior.
Besides this, we wanted to have a minimum viable product first before adding the features that a fully-fledged game would possess. If we ever decided to make a game in the future, a tutorial and other basic features of a video game would be prioritized much more than just the central gameplay.
Overall, everyone thoroughly enjoyed the process of doing something that we had never done before. Each member of the team found a good niche role to fulfill, and we worked well communicating back and forth about what we needed from each other to complete our individual assignments. Modularity is extremely powerful, and it allows a great deal of freedom in game development.
Final Project Report
Summary/Debrief
Overall, our project was a success. We received a lot of praise across the board during Technigala from visitors. It was eye-catching to our target audience, children, while still being fun for college students and other adults.
Validation
We successfully made a game that children enjoyed playing. It was extremely enjoyable to watch people of all ages from 5 years old to 50+-year-old professors experience a sense of childlike joy when something unexpected happened.
Unfortunately, we could not upload the finalized version of the game to itch.io until after Technigala because we continued to tweak and retweak the game until everyone was 100% satisfied with the end product. Now, we can analyze the results of how many people downloaded the game. Countless people that were not at Technigala have voiced an interest in being able to play the game in one form or another. We look forward to being able to continue to share the game with people in the future.
Potential Next Steps
Our next steps would be to continue to polish the presentation of the game. Having a better way to display controls is a priority, as we need to handle different screen sizes.
Next, adding new game modes to keep players coming back. We have a good structure to place them in, without having to do a large restructuring of the code. Breaking the setup area into a separate hub world means we can switch scenes to any game mode we create.
As a long-term goal, adding online multiplayer would be a nice addition. Unity does have capabilities to support online multiplayer, but looking into Steam's specific architecture would be most appealing.
Final Takeaways
We learned a great deal about the process of video game development. Because we used a physics-based engine, the same inputs can result in wildly different results compared to an animation engine which results in the same output given the same input. Consequently, finding and fixing minor bugs was a slight issue. It is very easy to do something never done before which would slightly glitch the engine and result in unwanted behavior.
Besides this, we wanted to have a minimum viable product first before adding the features that a fully-fledged game would possess. If we ever decided to make a game in the future, a tutorial and other basic features of a video game would be prioritized much more than just the central gameplay.
Overall, everyone thoroughly enjoyed the process of doing something that we had never done before. Each member of the team found a good niche role to fulfill, and we worked well communicating back and forth about what we needed from each other to complete our individual assignments. Modularity is extremely powerful, and it allows a great deal of freedom in game development.
Medium Post:
https://medium.com/dartmouth-cs98/looking-for-a-game-to-bring-the-family-together-come-participate-in-the-farm-frenzy-9b20e6789f9c
Gifs