Project Postmortem

Hi everyone. Thank you for following the (brief) development of Pogo Adventure. We have a few words to say in postmortem regarding the development of this project. We hope this can give you insight to the design process and the bumps we faced along the way.

What did you change from the initial plan? 

• Initially, we were given the prompt "A scientist embarks on a quest to cure a disease thought incurable, aiming to achieve the pinnacle of medical breakthroughs." This didn't leave us with a lot of great initial ideas. Our first thought was to make some kinda of anti-Plague Inc. game where players work to cure the virus instead of exterminating humanity, until we discovered that Plague Inc. has already released a "Cure Mode" which was fundamentally the same idea. We then pivoted into a 2d platformer, leaning towards a metroidvania style of gameplay. A scientist would bounce on his cure blasting pogo-stick and save the world. Evidently, a lot of this did not come through in the final version. Our main character is now a robot and there is very little metroidvania gameplay (key items, backtracking). We also never got to finish the power-ups and cool unlockable moves that we initially planned. Our curing system is a lot less sophisticated than we previously hoped. We wish civilians could've served an important role in this game other than just being not directly threatening. We also never got to do a final boss. Overall, I would say we nailed the movement and platforming but a lot of other cool ideas were scrapped from the initial plan.

What went right with your final project?

• We are really satisfied with the movement, combat, and platforming, which we think is the heart of our game. We love the wall jumping and bouncing on enemies. It's like a 2D mario game with the movement of Getting Over It. The gameplay along with the level design are very rewarding to play. We are also very happy with Eric's custom background music. It really gives an intense feel to the game, and juice like this makes the game feel like more than a student project. 

What went wrong with your final project?

• A lot of things were already mentioned being scrapped, all of which are not necessarily something that went wrong, but it is a shame that it could not be included in the final version. Other than that, we faced plenty of small challenges along the way in development. Personally, I could not get FMOD to work so I could never make builds of the game and had to ask the other members of the group to build for me. To this day, I still don't know why. Other small challenges like fine tuning the movement and designing levels were surprisingly challenging and time consuming. Some earlier drafts of the game only worked in certain resolutions and did not transfer to WebGL well, and a lot of tweaks had to be made last minute. I think the worst thing that happened though was that 2 of our 3 members got sick in the last week of development, making the last touches more or less rushed and not well thought out. I cannot speak for Ethan, but personally some of the code I wrote in those days were of the most disgusting I have ever seen.

What would you do differently next time?

• I feel that every game design professor has always told me and will always tell me to keep the scope of projects low. This is the best advice and will continue to be the best advice for future student projects. If we as a team focused our energy into more fundamental components and never tried to code half baked features then I think the fundamental gameplay would be even more clean. I would also like to thank Ethan for managing the Notion, it was really useful for managing tasks.

If you could add one more week of development, what would you add?

• For a final week of development, I think we would want to do a boss fight. We would preferably have a custom sprite, a new scene, and some unique mechanics like bouncing off of projectiles or limb health bars. I think the current ending sequence is a little anti-climactic. I was thinking of a boss that you needed to bounce enemies into to do damage, or maybe a boss that needed some sort of platforming challenge. 

This concludes the development of Pogo Adventures. Thank you again for playing.