CRE312 End of Semester Post Mortem of the year long development of Herding Ghosts

What went right / worked well or better than expected?

• Players really enjoyed the art
• The cutscenes and cutscene transitions worked really well
• People understood the day night cycle easily
• People knew to open the store early on
• Roti worked well to bring people to the pantry
• Scrum meetings in class were effective in keeping everyone on top of their tasks
• The team were passionate about the game and often expressed fun ideas
• The dedication the team was willing to put forth in working on the game.
• Positivity that the team had reworking the game. It took a lot of effort but everyone on the team continued forward trusting in each other in creating what we have today.
• The gameplay started to pick up after further polish, it was definitely lost for a bit but through trial and error with the help of everyone we started nailing it.

What went wrong / didn’t really work?

• Players were not able to find the broom once they were cooking,
• The ectoplasm gathering was difficult to convey
• Players were sometimes unable to figure out that the food had to be in order.
• Players had no way to rearrange the items. This is unfortunate as the player has to start again sometimes.
• UI would overlay multiple times
• Team communication could’ve been better at times (Trello wasn’t always used, work lost/overwritten on Git, not responding to messages on discord, etc.)
• Didn’t utilise the wiki or art repo as much as was intended
• Team members having to perform other member’s tasks due to them being left late
• Time management was a large issue on the team, with everyone having different schedules having people work together at the same pace was difficult.
• There was a lot of reliance on certain group members during the development process, this caused issues with delays and unnecessary stress on members.
• Occasionally people would be very slow in responding, almost not treating this as a professional task.
• During some occasions, there was little to no information on what current members are currently facing causing late work or nothing at all. It would have been nice to have a heads up, instead of radio silence.

What would you do differently next time (or if you had your time over)?

• Paper prototype early to get a sense of the gameplay loop.
• Important tools like the broom need to be placed somewhere where they are regularly visible, this is solved by moving the broom into the kitchen.
• Some sort of positive feedback when placing items into the cauldron would help.
• There should be some way to remove items from the workstations
• Due to conflicting schedules, meeting up was difficult, however prioritising these things more may have resulted in being able to communicate and get things done more effectively as a team
• Prioritise getting the core mechanics in first so they could be adequately playtested
• Getting the idea of the game nailed before development
• Be more proactive in discord and other software and encouraging others to do the same
• Be more assertive and positive to allow for motivation and diligence towards the development of the game.