Post Mortem

Contributors

This was a solo project, with all code and design made by me. The assets however, were taken from excellent contributors in the community - through OpenGameArt.org (users LordNeo, Lionkanzen, Kyzerole & Rawdanitsu) and Unity Asset Store (users 

Project Overview

This was a learning project. The main goal was to get something from idea to published game in no more than a month. I have a full time job and family, so the time budget was very tight - some days resulting in no more than a couple of minutes of work.

What went well

The game was published, with two different game modes and few known bugs. 

What went wrong

Very much. I spent the first day writing a Game Design Document that I opened up zero times during the course of the project. This affected the project in such a way that I never had a clear list of what features to implement, and thus I had no clear definition of when a feature (and by extension the entire game) would be considered finished.

The second part that went wrong is related - not having a list of features to implement on a high level also meant that I had no proper to do-list or priority schedule to work with - just a vague sense of what was missing. This meant I wasted a lot of time during the few available time slots I had during my day just moving from task to task. Those issues in the game where I didn’t know how to proceed was constantly put off to later in order to maintain a false sense of progress - even though when I finally sat down with the more complex problems was the time that I actually developed my skill and knowledge of Unity.

Conclusions - Lessons Learned

The biggest lesson learned throughout the project is to always spend the time to maintain a proper to do-list, and not just wing it. Defining what features to implement for a first prototype, sticking with them and then readjusting to do- and feature lists afterwards once the prototype is done will hopefully make my next project more time effective.