Devlog Post 2-Postmortem with 4 sections: Successes, challenges, what we learned, and possible future revisions

Devlog Post 2-Postmortem with 4 sections: Successes, challenges, what we learned, and possible future revisions

Successes: The successes we had in developing our platformer game included effectively creating the motion of the player and creating a creative narrative by having the player character successfully be able to collect balloons and mandatory items to go through gates to progress towards a final stage birthday party scene. The narrative we developed for the game worked throughout the levels as we had initially planned. 

Challenges: Some challenges in making our platformer game included making sprites and backgrounds for the levels because we had little experience with art and we wanted backgrounds that helped better emphasize the narrative of our game. Our game narrative had a birthday party theme where the player has to collect all balloons throughout the levels to create a birthday party final scene. Also, figuring out how to create more difficulty in the transition between easier levels to harder levels was a challenge because the easier levels and harder levels would seem repetitive and there would be platforms and balloons placed on a level that would be too hard for an easy level or too easy for a hard level. 

What we learned: What we learned from developing this platformer game was that the transition between levels, the sprites, backgrounds, and each of the level’s features was important in helping people playing the game to understand the game’s narrative. Also, it is important to make sure that the game user would be able to feel increasing difficulty throughout the levels because throughout the game’s development, some harder levels that initially looked hard would actually be as easy as the easy levels. Additionally, the placement of platforms was important for defining the difficulty of the platforms because platforms that were placed closer together were easier to maneuver as a player and platforms that were placed farther from each other would need more jumping or speed to be able to get from platform to platform. Also, the sprites and backgrounds really define the appearance of the game narrative. The balloons, a birthday party scene, and gates in each level adds depth to the game’s birthday party narrative just by having those stationary features present in the levels. The surroundings of each of the levels also helped game users understand what the game’s narrative was and helped motivate game users to continue to other levels and reach the game’s objective of making a birthday party using the collected balloons on each level. 

Possible Future Revisions: Future revisions we would make to the game would be adding different sounds when the player jumps to higher platforms or when the player jumps to lower platforms. Also, we could add different background music when the player reaches different levels. Other revisions would be decreasing the jumping ability of the player to make it more difficult for the player to reach platforms. Also, another revision could be changing the lighting around specific platforms or entire levels when the player reaches the harder levels. We had several unused enemy sprites. With more time, we would probably add pigeons that dive down to also pop balloons. A vision at the beginning of development was to visually show the number of balloons collected by having them follow the player, such as in the movie Up. With more time and more knowledge with how to make balloons float realistically, it would be nice to add that back into the final product.