Successes

The biggest success was being able to create a fully functioning and fun interactive mobile game within a month. Our asset pack luckily had many animations for us to choose from to use as sprites, as well as idle, death, attack, and movement animations for all of the enemies and the player. In order to make the enemies glitch out, we added each with a new animation where the enemy would pixelate and change color. We were also successful in adding multiple levels and mini games, as well as an entertaining combat system. 

Challenges

One of the most challenging aspects of this game was coming up with a concept that was compatible on mobile. The beginning stages of the game were difficult, since we had to pivot very quickly and lost a lot of time to version 1 of the game. What was even more challenging was making up for this lost time and ending up with a fully fledged end product. Another difficulty we encountered was optimizing the game to fit a mobile screen. This was difficult since people have different sized phones, so for some builds the game looked right, and for others, certain words looked too big or got cut off. 

With the numerous amount of advice we got from the professor and classmates, we found that implementing them wasn’t the issue. The biggest struggle was addressing them all within the time frame. We found that with the amount of time we had, we had to make hard decisions on what we would push to possible future revisions and what we could do before the deadline. However, even with these minor setbacks, the team was very satisfied with the end product of the game, as well as enjoyed playing it ourselves.

What We Learned

The team learned how to make an entire mobile game from start to finish. We also learned the importance of teamwork as well as good communication and understanding. It's important to acknowledge that there really isn’t much difference between the games we had spent creating during the semester versus creating one for mobile code and art wise. The greatest difference between the two however, was the size of the UI, and how everything that was visible had to be either vital to the gameplay or not shown at all. Since everything had to be much smaller, it was more important for us to focus on mechanics, rather than focus on sprite detail. With a lot of our previous games, we were able to create more complex user interfaces. However for this one, we had to give up a lot of the interface, and keep everything visually simple. 

Possible Future Revisions

Since the player navigates a lot of rooms, we wanted to implement a map so that the player could track which puzzles they have solved, and which rooms they have cleared. Also, since it is a mobile game, it is important to recognize the fact that sometimes the player would want to replay our game. We found that once you play through the game, you kind of already know how to solve it, and the puzzles become less entertaining. The team thought that this could be fixed by procedurally generating more mini games or levels, or perhaps vastly expanding what the player could be given when they load into the app. In order to make the game more “ours” we also wanted to create our own assets. However, with the asset pack we chose, we were able to save a lot of precious time focusing just on mechanics and less on style. Another revision would be to make the game more "glitchy," perhaps through sounds or other visuals, not just on the enemies.