CAGD 377 - Blog Post Postmortem - 12/15/2024

The one thing that went right was getting the blocks to move when you swiped on the screen and having them merge when two of the same values were swiped into each other. This needed to go the way we were hoping for because the swipe and merge is the main feature of the game and if this didn't work then we would be a disaster. Even having the cube move one space at a time when you swiped would make the game feel clunky and unfun to play, so when I was able to get the swipe and merge working it was almost like getting the hardest thing done first. It made it easy once I got the values all set up because I could then make them a list that anyone in the group could add on to and it was so much easier than adding in a whole bunch of different if statements in the code. This also allowed us to go back and change the color of them later if we wanted to as well as it was made in a way where we could have changed it from the basic cubes to the models of zombies, but we decided against that. 

One of the most frustrating things that was happening during the entire development process was the fact that I was trying to get the cubes to visually slide over slowly so people could more easily see them moving, but this was something that I was unable to do in the second sprint then it just became something I was working on at the end of every sprint on my own time because it was making me so frustrated not being able to figure it out. The main reason why I was trying so hard to do it on my own was to test my problem-solving skills. By the end of the third sprint, it became more of a wish item and the longer I waited and the less important it was to have it in the game the more I would forget about going to office hours and asking for help. In the end, my team decided to settle on a line trail and players didn't seem to have a problem figuring out where the cubes were going, they were leaving feedback saying that they would like to have it, but it isn't changing the fun level of the game. 

Another thing that was giving me issues but I wasn't told until the last day of work before the game was published was when you upgraded the cubes the first time they would start spawning in 4’s and 8’ as opposed to the usual 2’s and 4’s so if you still had any 2’s on the board there was a chance that they would remain there the whole game. I didn't think about it when I was going through and my group had about two days to tell me this, but it wasn't brought up until the last minute, so I tried my best to figure it out, but I was unsuccessful and not wanting to break the game right before publish date I left it as is.

Something that I am proud of is the attack system as a whole. The only part of that system that I didn't do were the animations of how the cities move when you defeat them but the rest of it and the upgrade system were a bit of a challenge. One thing about the attack is that you can either choose to attack or if you run out of open spaces on your board you will auto-attack and lose half the board. Originally you just lost but then the designer decided it would be better if you were able to auto attack but that meant that some of the board had to be wiped for it to not auto attack on repeat. Having the board wiped was the second most difficult part I think because it did not want to work it would either make you lose, or the game would crash and so it took me almost a full day just sitting down figuring that out, but that work paid off.

What I would change if I had to do this development process over aging would be getting a better idea of what we are making and what work we are doing. There were times when two or more people would have such similar cards that they were basically doing the same thing and so we would waste a lot of time because one of our things would just get thrown out because the other did it already and it works a little better. On the other hand, if I was to redo all of it, I would have to keep the mindset we had during the last 3 sprints as I feel as if we were riding high because we were all so excited to finally have published our work we've been doing all semester long.