Conclusion

Development

A lot has been done since the alpha release concerning playability. We focused on improving the enemy behavior and adding a better spawning system. Other than that a lot of time was spent optimizing the game and improving the framerate. Unfortunately that was not completely successful.

Improvements

• Improved enemy behavior:
  • Enemies attack in waves
  • Enemies are smarter with pathfinding, deciding which player to attack
  • Enemies also shoot from a distance
• Additional graphical effects for explosions, destroyed walls, picking up powerups.
• New HUD.
• Improved level with destroyable walls.

Conclusion

We basically met the desired target, except for one thing: We didn't implement upgradable weapons. Our project plan was not completely realistic: Especially at the beginning (Interim report) we were quite behind the planning. We managed to catch up to a degree later on but for all milestones we missed the planned targets. We consistently had the feeling that we were a few days behind. Honestly, I (Alex) personally think that we underestimated the importance of all the preliminary planning (physical prototype especially), and this was what caused us to get behind. We had the feeling that we fully understood our gameplay, and this possibly led us to not work so hard on the prototype, but in any case, working on the prototype would have been a good decision.

Project Conclusion

Questions

1. What was the biggest technical difficulty during the project?
   Getting good performance on XBox and Windows.
   Learning how to use blender was also much more work than originally anticipated, especially since we started working around the time of a new Beta release of the newest version of Blender, and some functions simply did not work on some computers. A lot of time was spent trying to get the animation exporter to work properly, and we assumed that all the problems were user error, but in the end the problem disappeared once the stable release was finally available.

2. What was your impression of working with the theme?
   The theme was more or less ignored after the project idea had been worked out.

3. Do you think the theme enhanced your game, or would you have been happier with total freedom?
   The theme is a good idea, but can be annoying if someone already has a great idea that doesn't fit the theme. Additionally, although the point of the theme is to somehow simulate a customer-developer relationship, it can be a bit annoying to constantly have to justify ideas in relationship to the theme once a good idea that somewhat fits the theme has been created. Perhaps using the theme only to get all group members on the same page at first would be a good idea. Then, once all members are satisfied with the direction in which the game is headed, removing the emphasis on tying everything back to the theme might further enhance creativity.

4. What would you do differently in your next game project?
   Since we gained a lot of experience during this course and did a lot of things wrong, we would probably do pretty much everything different. Now we know how to do things better so that's a good thing.
   Also, breaking up the work in a more logical fashion would have been a good idea. We had one person doing all of the models in Blender, and one person doing all of the work of importing them and figuring out how to animate them. Perhaps having one person doing both tasks would have decreased the amount of overhead work caused by miscommunication and fundamental misunderstandings of the framework.

5. What was your greatest success during the project?
   Getting a working game together.
   I personally was proud of the quality of my models at the end of the project. I had never modeled before, and I was told that I would never be satisfied with my work. However, at the end I was pleasantly surprised with how happy I was with my work.

6. Are you happy with the final result of your project?
   Yes.

7. Do you consider the project a success?
   Not 100%. We did not completely finish our desired target, so if we had more weapons and player models it would have been perfect. Additionally, we ran out of time to complete the gameplay experience, which was a bit disappointing. It was difficult not to feel that the group was consistently a week behind. This may have been because of a lack of focus when creating our physical prototype, and our underestimating the importance of this step of the process. Also, things like work on blender modeling should have been started much sooner (even before we were fully introduced to the XNA framework). Perhaps teams in the future should be encouraged to really start modeling earlier in the process so that all members can focus more on XNA.

8. To what extend did you meet your project plan and milestones (not at all, partly, mostly, always)?
   See Development part.

9. What improvements would you suggest for the course organization? (perhaps in D1 evaluation)?
   It's ok like this I think. Again, introducing modeling tools, and suggesting that work on modeling be started earlier would be a good idea.

10. Did you like the XNA framework?
    It is easy to use, but working on the XBox was frustrating.

Screenshots

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