Reflections: Team Interviews

Emily Krasser

Our team made fantastic progress with this game. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to create this, considering that the project was only started halfway through the quarter, but we made do with the amount of time we had and created a great game. This is evidenced by the complete feeling that our game gives; when played, you can tell that it’s a full game in and of itself. All of the character interactions are there, all of the puzzle mechanics are present, and the fantasy worldbuilding is mostly complete. Quite a bit of the artwork was our own, with only the puzzle scene backgrounds being outsourced art assets.

If we had another two weeks, I would say that the focus would be on making more challenging puzzles and more of them for each color, more places for the player to explore and more characters, making the game from all original artwork, and working on certain mechanics like npc image changes and world color changes.

Thankfully we’ll have that time since we’ll be continuing development over the summer!

Kayla Sprague

Being in a group with Emily and Sufiah was a great experience because not only are they hard workers and intelligent people, but they are also very kind, funny, enjoyable people to be around. I was intimidated by our differences in experience with Unity as we entered the 5-week period for the final project, believing that I may be a burden. Instead they both helped me better understand Unity and made what work I could do appreciated towards the progress of our games development. We all provided positive feedback on the work we did and made sure to communicate in the our discord channel throughout the entire development. So, although we were limited on time, there is an abundance of evidence in our group chat that shows how much effort we invested in making our idea come to life.

I want to reiterate that we only had 5 weeks for our submission because we would have liked to do more (…and we just may over the Summer). If we had 2 more weeks, I believe would have tried to add an additional puzzle(s) to the game to expand on play time and story progression. I also think we would have been able to create an animation between scenes and color changes to provide a more polished experience for the player. Additional graphics would have been added as well. I think that mechanically the game is sound due to it being a simple 2D side scroller short story game, but having more playable content would have been wonderful. In summary, the 3 priority items would have been 1.) additional playable content, 2.) animations between scenes and color changes, and 3.) more visual graphics.

Ultimately I obtained a small scale experience of what it is like to develop a game. I now have a better understanding of the scope size in developing a game. I can also say that having an enjoyable group makes the experience of development fun and the results of a project greater.

Sufiah Ahmad

I think that the one thing we did well as a group was communicating, and our willingness to help the team. All of my members are hard working, and despite juggling other classes I felt like they all put in an admirable amount of effort. This can be seen in our entire game through the beautiful art created by Emily Krasser, and also the backgrounds that were found and added in by Kayla Sprague.

If we had another 2 weeks to work on the game, then I think that the three things we would work on would be improving the second puzzle to make it more challenging, implementing more NPCs that the user can interact with, and adding a “fade” transition so that the color does not change so suddenly.