Reflection

Playtesting & Feedback:

One edit recommended to me was to add color variation; to reference one of my emotions. Taking this another step further, a recommendation was to dramatize audio during the final showdown.

Development:

It's been common practice for me to begin my projects with a concept, and being with coding. I think that became a habit because coding goes the slowest for me. For this project, starting out with concept art or any sort of visual draft would've helped tremendously with the pacing. My idea for this game came out of left field as a result of having no visual aid: you're an actor who is afraid of heights. Fly while you're acting but don't fall. My three emotions were originally fear, shock, and excitement. In the middle of the process I decided to change these to anxiety, patience, and shock. Below is an image of some of my notes during development:

Successes:

The game's visuals came out better than what I was expecting at the end of this stretch. Over the summer, I had practiced some sprite animation using Photoshop to create skeletons and then animate them in Unity. I am glad to see that my practice paid off. The Enemy AI gave me a lot of trouble just trying to get it right, but I was able to buckle down and create 3 unique AI behaviors for my enemies in this game. It went pretty good for my first time, but I need some brushing up on it (again, coding).

Setbacks:

At the very beginning, I lost a whole 2 days trying to start working on the project. Unity did not want to run anything on my MacBook, so I had to think quickly and switch my entire workspace (for all of my classes) to my desktop. The other thing that set me back didn't really have much to do with the developing of the game. A lot of things have happened in my life over the last 3 weeks for this project, and most of the time it was really difficult for me to work with a clear head. I ultimately lost a lot of time to work on it. I was unable to give the fly cables (the brown lines) their sprite. It has to do with it being a line renderer and not a game object. Lastly, audio. In my process, I save audio for last since its the most grey area for me. Because of this, it suffers the most in quality. 

What I Learned:

Rather than talk about the setbacks, since there's nothing that could've really been done, I should mention what I learned when I was coding the AI. I need to spend less time on it. If I'm stuck on something in the coding, it's better if I use all my strength to skip it and come back to it later. This way, I can get a LOT more done in a shorter time.

Future Development:

-Spend more time polishing the background/adding background motion.

-Making sure all objects have their respective sprites (going back to the fly cable issue)

-Add more visual cues for the player. The clipper is shocking as it should be, but something to at least warn the player couldn't hurt.

-Create my own sounds for the game. I am currently learning how to do so.