Development Process


Roles:

David worked on a majority of the art and animation, some level brainstorming, and a small bit of coding. I, Daniel, worked on a majority of the coding, did some sketching for art ideas, and a couple of animations.

Brainstorming/Goals Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hsr0VmvDaqkgL8brjfdbfB7ApW_CaCXoUaDJToU29aw/...

Development Videos: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qo5G8EC0g8Eiu74a8hc0qZKBGJpVyU4T/view?usp=shari...

What went right:

With the art, we started with a concept and were able to see it come to life extremely close to how it was originally envisioned. Our communication was without confusion, and this went a long way in terms of staying on track (on time) and getting to all of the ideas we wanted to try. That's one of the best takeaways from this project; both of us were equally as passionate about developing the game, and as a result our works each complemented one another cleanly. We weren't sure if we'd have the time to add enemies and then add a color gimmick to them, but thankfully each of us worked pretty quickly on the work to see it through.

Setbacks:

There weren't many setbacks, and time isn't really a setback, but there was one time where there was a NullReferenceException. Having originally thought the issue was the input system, do to the fact that the line of code was assigning a value to the player's movement, I had spent 3 hours trying to solve the issue. It turns out the problem was something entirely different, and it involved the scene's hierarchy. It's a long story, but the point is that we lost 3 precious hours of development time. 

What went wrong:

Towards the end of the development time, I personally feel like I didn't give the level design as much care as I did in the first 2 levels. It began to feel less like a puzzle platformer and more like a difficulty-focused, adventure platformer. Another failure was the neglect of sound. One thing that this project has taught me is that just like animation and coding, sound must also be developed at the same time. It makes no sense to have only one really powerful party member when the rest of the team is getting killed in one hit. It might not be the best of analogies for this scenario, but definitely showing some care to the sound a lot earlier in the process would make it seem less like a chore and more like a necessity, because it is.

Future Development:

We are actually thinking about continuing to work on this game. It has a lot of potential, and it feels clean already. Sound needs to be added, and before we get to redesigning the levels and mechanics to cater to a puzzle platformer, the sound will be the top priority. The other thing, and its a minor fix (or maybe a big one, we'll find out), is to revise the code so that the player's jump height is based on the duration that the jump button has been held down.

Files

TheHexPerplexWindowsVer1.3.zip 19 MB
Oct 26, 2020
TheHexPerplexMacOSVer1.3.zip 21 MB
Oct 26, 2020

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.