AREND DANIELEK
TECHNICAL DESIGNER
Analysis & Post Mortoms
Here I will take a look at some of my previous projects from an analytical perspective. Reviewing some of the good and bad decisions made on each of the project in order to prevent repeating the issues in the future.
Vapor
Vapor is by far my largest project to date. I took on the project comepletely underestimating the scope of it. While I don't regret jumping on the project it was definitely the most draining process I have ever undergone.
Vapor was developed over an eight month development cycle and we should have realized when we lost half of the team at the beginning of the semester that we needed to scope down, at least more than we did. With such a talented art team we overestimated the amount of content we could produce.
I would say the biggest mistake I personally made when working on Vapor was overestimating my own personal abilities. While we succeeded in making a fun beautiful game, when we started on the project I was so sure that I was capable of doing everything. I lacked the foresight to see that while yes I could make the game, in the beginning we didn't have all the tools needed to do so.
While we started unknowingly from behind we quickly began to understand what we were missing. This combined with the team changes that started the project led to drastic changes in how we were developing the game. We hired new members and while this allowed us to create the content we needed. It meant more content had to be put into the game.
Looking back at the development cycle of Vapor we had a lot of issues, but it was an amazing learning experience. We learned how to intimately work with people from other game industry practices. While working in an under development engine was difficult at times it also allowed us power over what features would be made available through out development. We became better communicators, workers, organizers, and better people.
Rainbow Rush
Rainbow Rush is one of my favorite personal projects. The base mechanics are based off of games such as PuzzleCraft and Bejeweled. I made it over the period of a week but I would still like to go back an polish it as I believe the concept has great potential.
When I started on Rainbow Rush i was trying to capture the kinesthetic enjoyment I got from PuzzleCraft when I was collecting the game pieces. I feel that this was achieved fairly well. What made it challenging was the use of a mouse instead of the tactile touchscreen most game of this type use. I overcame this by allowing the player to collect pieces in a diagonal direction as well as cardinal. This freedom of motion made the physical player collection movements were more smooth. It also allowed me to increase the size of the board and have the player collect more pieces with each action which felt more rewarding.
The balancing required in the procedural generation of the game board was probably the most challenging aspect of the game. I really apprciated the modularity of my data for the board generation syste, later on when the heavy amount of balancing was done in response to playtesting.
While Rainbow Rush came out quite fun I find that it lacks the polish that I would like. Players have the necessary feedback to play the game but there are some actions and systems in the game that are not explained well enough. Players often did not understand the purpose of the Prism feature until they actually used it, and by that point they were not able to foresee the consequences of doing so. This could all be fixed qith more in depth feedback and a true tutorial proccess that was seperate from the game itself.
Rainbow Rampage
Rainbow Rampage is the second in my serios of Rainbow games. I love the themes of these games because it is simple and something I can do with my minimal art production. After working on Rainbow Rush I wanted a game with simpler mechanics, a past time platformer if you will. While this made the implementation of the functionality easier it put a lot of pressure on the quality of those mechanics.
I chose to minimize the player controlled mechanics down to a simple jump. Well how do you make the one action the players has interesting? I chose to use variation of the jump mechanic. Knowing I wanted it to be another race for survival game the obvious objective was to not touch the ground. That is where falling platforms came into play.
Falling platforms introduce to much complexity. Players would have to be able to stand on them and move around. While this had some benefits, the actions didn't seem to fit into the window the player normally had before they had to jump again. So I replaced the platforms with simple piece that refreshed and added variation to the jump. Soon by adding a limitation I was able to make jumping a resource. Players are forced to think tactilely about their next target.
Like Rainbow Rush however Rainbow Rampage was developed in a relatively short amount of time forcing me to focus more on the functionality of mechanics and systems. The game definitely lacks some feedback and grace. Much of the explicit information could be infered quite clearly through in game feedback on players actions. I feel Rainbow Rampage like its sibling has potential but lacks the polish for extended engagement.