Postmortem

Introduction

This game is about a prisoner trying to escape from the prison. For this project, we created sprites, animations, level maps, and background music.

What went right (4 things)

• Animation (Cindy)
  • This is the second time for me to create character animations in pixel style. I spent a lot of time watching tutorials and trying things by myself. I think the most difficult part for me was to decide whether to keep the pixels on the edge or not because the sprite could look very different with/without one single pixel. After finishing the running and idling animations, I was very unsure if the animation looks good or not but during the play tests, many people told me that they look great, which is way beyond my expectation. 
• Physics (Cindy)
  • The character's moving speed, the jump height, and the gravity took me some time to adjust. The moving speed need to match the character's animation so that he doesn't look like he is sliding or running without moving. The jump height need to match the background because we have doors in the background image. To make the jump look more realistic, the character can not jump higher than the door while, at the same time, he need to be able to jump to the next platform. I also changed the gravity so that the jumping and falling would seem more natural, without the character feeling to floaty.
• Aesthetics (Analisse)
  • When designing the backgrounds for the game, there were a lot of elements that I wanted to include. However, I think that it was best to cut a lot of those additional features like animating the lights, or and other prisoners to the background cells for several reasons. The one being time management. It was not beneficial to spend so much time on the backgrounds when the code was more important. 
• Animation (Analisse)
  • While I haven't worked with animating in Unity a whole lot, I have done some basic animations before. Getting the Lose Screen to feel like you are being locked behind bars was very interesting to work on. One would think its a simple slide animation. Which in a way that is true. However, I wanted a certain pace for the bars to move which wasn't too fast or too slow. I am very happy that the few hours I spent working on it paid off.

What went wrong (4 things)

• Animator System in Unity (Cindy)
  • This is the first time for me to deal with a character with four animations under different commands. I took it way too complicated and eventually got myself really confused. In the Lab class, I asked John about what was wrong with my animator system and he told me that I did not need an animation facing left and another facing right because I can do flipX in code. It really saved a lot of time for me, but I didn't get to clean up the messy animator system. I think next time I will try to make it look as simple as possible because it is possible for the character to have more types of animations/movements, and it's definitely going to confuse me again with a messy animator map.
• Instructions (Cindy)
  • The platforms we have in the game were hard to distinguish from the background image. During the PLAYTECH, many kids did not understand that there were platforms that they need to jump up to. We quickly changed the color of the platforms, but with the rails blocking the view, it was still a little hard to figure out where the character should go. Another thing is that we do not have an instruction telling players what keys to press, therefore during the PLAYTECH I had to explain to each player about the controls.
• Sound (Analisse)
  • One thing we wanted to implement in this game was sound which unfortunately we didn't have enough time for.  Sound would have been great to use to help guide the player and even build suspense during gameplay. Maybe if we broke up our time more efficiently, we could have make time for search for sounds or even recording them.
• Jumping (Analisse)
  • When we started this project, the first thing we had to learn was the core movement mechanics. I coded how the character would move left and right and then added the jumping code. Unfortunately, it did not go as planned and we didn't have eough time to go back and fix it. At first the character would jump and never return. We did a fix and then the character wouldn't go so high but could double jump which we didn't want. It took a lot of time to get to where it is not but it could be better.   

What you learned

• Cindy
  • I learned a lot about creating the pixel animations and the animator system in Unity. I also learned about the enemy patrolling codes and the camera codes that Analisse created. Next time I will definitely have a cleaner animator system. Another thing I want to try is to create a complete prototype without any sprite because when creating the level maps, I do feel like the sprites are a little disturbing when trying to figure out where the platforms should go
• Analisse
  • I definitely learn a lot about structuring 2D games in Unity. I originally thought it would a simple process of placing sprites in the positions you wanted them in, write code and be done. However, it is not so easy. Learning new code and messing with different sprite settings was really fun and a great experience.