Blog Post - Postmortem

 I am the lead designer of The Three C-migos, the team behind the mobile game Dimensional Delivery. Throughout this past semester, we were able to be successful in many ways, and learned a lot about the development of mobile games. There were also many things throughout the development process that we could have done differently and optimized which would have saved us time down the road.

From the very beginning, what went well with our game was that we had a common understanding of the goals for our game. The communication between Chase, our programmer, and I was very open and we both understood what would and would not work for the game. This made planning and development so much easier at every phase of the game because we never struggled much with knowing what we should and should not implement. 

The first sprint progressed smoothly for a handful of reasons. I created a paper prototype from which I was able to extract a few main things out of the game design. The first one was that people found the idea of using physics to solve puzzles fun, which meant that our core idea was functional and we could proceed forward with a digital prototype. The other thing that I learned was that the level design would have to be much more in-depth in order to keep the players interested, because otherwise they would solve the puzzles quickly and then lose interest. While I created the paper prototype, Chase got started on the digital prototype, which streamlined my job as a designer. He was able to create functional portals and moving crates before the first sprint ended, which meant that as soon as I was done with creating the paper prototype, I was able to begin designing levels and trying to get a sense for what would and would not work for mobile.

I believe that what set us up for success the most throughout the class was that our iterative process kept the game fluid and constantly evolving. We received a lot of feedback through our various playtests on level design, UI, glitches, and overall user experience on what added to or detracted from the gameplay. From there, we were able to take the levels and give them much more variation in their solutions, as well as make them easy enough for the player not to feel frustrated by, but still be challenged. We added many features purely to aid the player in understanding the game mechanics, such as tutorial dialogue and a hint system. We were able to enhance the flexibility of play by adding a time-stop mechanic, allowing the player to choose which portal they placed, and adding a zoom-in camera which would activate when the player placed a portal so that they could accurately see where their portal would go.

Different iterations for the game logo.

I think that something that went wrong with our development process is that we realized far later in the process than we should have that we needed to diversify the way that players solved puzzles. For most of the game’s development cycle, the level design revolved around the idea that if you built up enough momentum, you could get the package to the finish line. This is not necessarily a bad core design, but the lack of other features such as triggers which could cause things to happen within the level made some levels much more uninteresting than others. 

Another thing that I realized much too late was that the sustainability and re-playability of our game was severely damaged by the fact that the game required levels to be designed. I realized this when I was playing Break By Colors, which is a game developed by another group in our class. The endless runner format meant that once the initial mechanics were designed, the team never had to create levels for the game. That made it easier for the developers to focus on other things, and the players would keep coming back for more because the core concept was enjoyable and did not get repetitive. However, solving this issue would require a completely different game design because that kind of level generation would go against the idea of a physically based game with puzzles.

If I were to do this all over again, I would make sure that I maintained a careful balance of gameplay features that allowed the player to diversify their gameplay experience. I would also add different features that would make it easier for me as a designer to try and challenge the players in different ways within levels. As far as what I would keep the same, we were very successful throughout the development process because of our communication above all. In addition, our constant iteration based on playtest feedback strengthened our gameplay experience to a great extent.