Milestone 10 [Project Post-Mortem] (Zineb)

Project Overview

Our project is a multi-platform game with both VR and desktop controls. The gameplay was designed to be linear. The player fights alien enemies that have taken over a spaceship belonging to a magical girl who is trapped on the moon. Using a magical wand, the player defeats enemies, which usually only take one hit, until reaching a final boss that is more challenging. After beating the boss, a puzzle is revealed. Once the puzzle is solved, the player saves Princess Luna, and she shares her power with them.

The main mechanics of MagicaLuna include:

• Core mechanics: player movement

• Action mechanics: wand combat system and color cycling

• Progression mechanics: each completed goal unlocks something new

• Strategy mechanics: puzzle solving

• Narrative mechanics: cutscene at the beginning, plus win and lose cutscenes with dialogue

• Feedback systems: audio, UI health and progress bars, particle effects, etc.

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Development and Design

The design and development of the game was a fun learning experience overall. At the start, coming up with the game dynamics, storyline, and mechanics was a bit challenging and took longer than expected. But once we had the basics figured out, everything else became much more straightforward.
The design and visuals came more naturally since we already had a clear vision from our previous game. To stay organized, we kept our Trello board updated, which really helped us keep track of what needed to be done for each milestone. Splitting the work between the three of us also worked really well, since everyone always had something to focus on. Whenever tasks overlapped, we made sure to communicate clearly.
Using GitHub helped a lot with organization too. We made sure to let each other know when someone was working on the main scene, and we created separate test scenes so we could work individually without interfering with each other. This helped us avoid merge conflicts and losing work.
Overall, dividing tasks like character and environment design, modelling, UI design and implementation, and desktop and VR controls helped us stay organized and set clear expectations. At the same time, we were still able to test each other’s work and give feedback throughout the process.

Challenges

Most of the challenges we faced were technical during the development process. We ran into issues like enemies wandering off or not respecting wall colliders, VR controls not feeling intuitive at first, and mouse clicking not working properly when trying to change the view from the telescope. There were also problems with player interaction scripts overlapping between VR and desktop, UI not showing up in VR, and the wand swinging mechanic along with its sound and visual effects not triggering when they were supposed to.

These were some of the main issues that came up while working on the project. Thankfully, we didn’t have any problems with lost work or group conflicts. It was mostly technical bugs, which were definitely frustrating at times, but we were able to work through them and fix them in the end.

Another challenge we faced was time constraints. Sometimes we weren’t always able to focus 100% on each milestone because we had overlapping assignments from other courses at the same time. This made it harder to stay consistent with progress, since sometimes we had to shift our attention to other deadlines.

Because of this, some parts of the project had to be rushed more than we would have liked, especially closer to milestone due dates. It also meant that we had to be more flexible with our planning and adjust tasks based on everyone’s availability. Even though we had our work split up, there were times when progress slowed down simply because of outside workload.

Overall, managing time alongside other courses was definitely a challenge, but we were still able to stay on track by communicating and prioritizing what needed to get done for each milestone.

Successes

Having the game come together and meet our expectations was a success on its own. It was really rewarding to see our initial planning and moodboards actually come to life in the final product. What started as ideas and concepts turned into a fully playable experience, which was honestly really cool to see. Another big success was how we managed to overcome the technical difficulties we ran into along the way. Even though there were a lot of bugs and issues during development, we were able to work through them and get everything functioning as intended by the end. 

Time spent on this sprint: hrs Total

Fixing bugs with final boss in vr/colliders in the environment (Zineb) : 5hrs 

Implementing the UI to VR (Zineb): 1hr

Adding player guides (Zineb): 2hrs

Building and testing (Zineb): 3hrs