Postmortem Devlog

Successes 

Although our interests were all over the place in the beginning, our collective brainstorming sessions in the first week helped us to establish a common idea that everyone was interested in. For example, we discussed that we wanted the environment to be realistic, which meant that we would only be looking for assets with such visual features. This was important in pushing our group forward because we were working remotely in different timezones and didn't have to wait if something wasn't agreeable with our concept. Another success was the audio, in which the sounds of the wind blowing went along well and made the arctic landscape more convincing and chilly.

Failures 

The biggest difficulty we faced during this project was definitely learning how to use Sourcetree and BitBucket. It was a new concept for all of us (committing, pulling, pushing) and had trouble keeping each other updated with the recent versions of the project. Once we finally got a better understanding of it, we soon discovered that the file size went over the limited storage and was unable to push our additional changes. We ended up exporting individual asset packages and importing them. We also tried to include a trekking pole for the player to create a hiking experience, but we faced many challenges when trying to stimulate a convincing movement when walking and ended up without. 

Lessons Learned 

As we began to build the scenes, we realized that there were many details we overlooked. Because we didn't have much experience in making games, we were focused on large concepts such as how the game looks like and how the game starts/ends. However, we didn't consider how the small details related to the large interactions. For example, how does the player know that the door opens? Is it just a change of scene or is there an audio component that goes along with the door opening? We had to go back and address some of these details when we found them during the process. However looking back, we think that these small details should be discussed in the brainstorming phase and approach brainstorming from a holistic view (from large concepts to small details) to build a more immersive game experience. 

Future Development

If we were to develop this further, we discussed that additional scenes would be beneficial in augmenting the exploration experience. Currently it has a straightforward journey where the penguins guide you to the clues, but if there were multiple scenes it would increase the boundaries where the user would have to look for clues. This would open up opportunities for subtle clues as well as more exploratory interactions in the environment. Also in order to focus more on exploration, we think perhaps interactions with objects that aren't necessarily clues to the friend could be interesting so you spend more time just roaming around the environment. For example, a book in the cabin would give the response of "Oh, it's just a book"  and that would be all of its interaction. 

Further feedback during class: appropriate scaling for player to objects, more visually communicating clues instead of messages, quest-approach without the friend distance indicator, sound effects to give back response (e.g., faucet turning, water sound).