Over the course of this semester, whilst working on this project, I feel that a lot of things went well, mean whilst other things not as well. Overall, I had a good time working on this project, as I think the idea conceptually is one of my favorites that I have created during my time here at DePaul. There are plenty of things I would change if I had done this project again from the beginning, but I’ll go over everything over this postmortem.

First off is how this game reflects me as a game designer, or at least how I want it too. For my skill set, I believe first and foremost that I am an artist. There are many styles that I am a fan of, but the one I have always been most interested in is the low-poly retro aesthetic of many old games that came out on consoles such as the GameCube. Even many modern indie games try to capture this aesthetic, and I think that I was able to capture this aesthetic partially in my game. I also lean towards level design, and character design as a game designer. I think I was able to capture these somewhat well, especially level design, in this project. Although I only have two levels, they don’t drastically differentiate from each other, and going to the next level feels smooth and transitions nicely. As for character design, I do love the concept of my character, but I feel I could’ve executed better through idle animations and more varied animations in attacking, and currently the player character is better portrayed through still images such as the menu screen.

Next I’ll go over design practice and process. My design process was all over the place for this project, and I’ve had a lot of reflection over this. I went into this project with a semi-complicated idea, knowing I wasn’t the best programmer by any means. I thought that even if it was rough and did not work fully, it would be fine by the end of this project. So my design process, although I am primarily an artist, was to split between both art and programming so I could have a somewhat functioning game that looked good visually through my own means rather than using premade assets. I’d make assets, then I’d try to program building off those assets. For example, I’d make my sprite sheets for animations such as the enemy and the player first person weapon. When I had those, I would then try to script the player character and enemy, how the animation would play. When the death animation for the enemy would play when the player shot them.

Ultimately, while some things worked, a lot of the core programming didn’t. Animations for my sprites played fine, enemy and player interactions worked somewhat correctly, but over the course of the semester I was trying to get my health mechanic to work in the way I wanted too. This had taken so much time that it had taken away time from the art side of the game, and that is something I regret. In my final critique, I went over some advice that I had thought up that could potentially help others. That was focusing on your skills, which I should’ve done with the art side of this game, because I found it more enjoyable in the long run. More importantly, get your important mechanics in a rough state, and iterate from there. I had built my game from scratch, adding in new mechanics that I knew I had wanted them, rather than having them added from the beginning. This meant a lot of changing in player scripts, which caused issues. Making new scripts that had errors interacting with other scripts. I built everything when I needed them, rather than adding in from the beginning, and polishing later down the line. This led to the greatest pitfall in my project, the health system I wanted for the game. I tried making the health system without having it in mind of the other scripts in the game, and in the end, I couldn’t get it to work.

In conclusion, this project had a lot of highs, and big lows. I am proud of what I made, however, especially the environment and design of the game, through the levels I created, the art in the menu. Even the music I made sounds good (too me) for this game, and I’m not the greatest at making music. Things that didn’t turn out as expected was the programming, as mentioned the health system was a huge core of my game that I couldn’t get too work. So too future me, or even anyone else either focus on your own strengths, or if you do want to focus on programming, get something rough working so you can iterate and polish it later down the line.