Capstone Game Post Mortem: Spell Book
Game App Icon
Title
Genre
Educational
Android and iOS
Revenue model
There is no revenue model associated with this game. It will be
released free through the Apple App Store and Google Play.
The development tools used was Unity for the overall development and
implementation. I used Photoshop for some more art modifications or additions
along the way.
The intended audience is children in grades Kindergarten through
Fifth grade.
Team
I worked alongside CelleC Games as a developer intern. CelleC Games
is owned and operated by Gerard Merritt (Executive Producer). The following
team members contributed to Spell Book’s design and/or development of assets.
Original Concept By – Matthew Hirtenstein
Producer – Pablo Rosero
Lead Designers – Rodrigo Santelices
Programming – Will Whittaker
Designers – Nicholas Reynolds, Dylan Smith, Pablo Rosero
Lead Artist – Laura Sardinha
2D & 3D Artists – Aarnel Castillo, Nykira Parham, Will Whittaker
SFX Artist – Silvia Padron
Music Artist – Marlon Castro Rivera
Copyright/Reference
CelleC Games. (2015). Spell Book (Version 3.1) [Android Game]. Winter
Park, FL: CelleC
Games.
Spell Book, Spell Book Icon, Spell Book Banner, and the CelleC Games
Logo are Copyright ©2015
CelleC Games. All Rights Reserved.
Capstone Screencast
Backstory:
Sound
Bite
Be a wizard! Complete the spells in this Spell Book to
create your own magic! Learn as you play!
Executive Summary
Complete spells and spell words
as you swipe letters. In this game the player must choose spells that they want
to complete from the Spell Book and are then given the words that are in the
spell. Once the game starts they must swipe letters to complete the words in
the spell(s). Players can also complete alternate words by swiping letters that
would finish a different word than in the spell.
Inspiration
I’m unsure what the
motivation was behind this game. The game was meant as a spiritual successor to
another CelleC Games title, called Math Slash in which players would slash
number to complete simple math equations.
Capstone
Scope
The scope originally was to
provide an educational learning experience to children while they were at play.
The scope was fulfilled completely.
Ideal
Honestly, everything did go
as perfectly as it could have. All of the ideals were met as originally
designed. The only thing missing from the game in its final state was a couple
camera animations to add a bit more depth to the space/game environment.
Originally it was planned to have the camera zoom in slightly to the Spell Book
on a podium and await the player to tap the screen to open the book. Then the
player would be able to navigate through the book by tapping the menu options
in order to flip through the pages of the book. Once the player navigated to
the point of the game starting, the camera was supposed to zoom out away from
the podium and rotate upwards to face the gameplay background.
In its current form, there
aren’t any camera animations, as it would have required a bunch of additional
3D environment assets to fill up the space to provide something other than a
blank/black empty background when the player started the game. While the above
would have been nice to have to provide a bit more effects and a clever use of
3D space with a 2D game, it was more of a polish feature than anything and did
not hinder the functionality on the game in any way.
The
Critique: What went right…
Overall most things went
right in the process of developing this game. This is one of the better projects
that I’ve been a part of. As far as the development itself, the programming
that I was responsible for, and the implementation of the functionality, there
wasn’t a whole lot that didn’t go right. Aside from the bugs that popped up
along the way, most of which weren’t hard or time consuming to fix at all,
everything came together really well throughout all 3 months of development. I
enjoyed this project and working with the team quite a bit.
Design & Aesthetics
There were a lot of things that went really well in regards to the
design document, the mechanics, and the balancing of the game. The artwork in
its final form seemed to work really well and was very consistent to the theme
and style that were intended in the very beginning of the design. I came into
the project after the design was already created so I had the pleasure of going
through the design document and providing suggestions and requests for
clarification where needed. The audio is very smooth and fits rather well with
the rest of the game, providing a mystical and magical aesthetic. When it comes
to the UI screens and controls, these were carefully planned and tested to be
the easiest and most clever usage of space possible for the given
circumstances. There was very little narrative except in the way of a very
brief tutorial with voiceovers though I believe this works well also.
Project Management
In regards to the project management, I had a lot of fun utilizing
the Underdog system. It was quite a handy tool and I especially enjoyed the
task tracking and management section of it. I believe the system was based off
of Redmine and this was the first time I had ever used it. I would definitely
recommend it to others in the future because I found it to be extremely helpful
for keeping track of hours spent designing and developing and the tasks with
deadlines especially.
In regards to the scope, weekly sprints, and development roadmap, I
believe this was carefully calculated, delegated, and distributed evenly
throughout all three months. With the way this was handled it allowed me to be
able to get the most done each week as possible without creating an overloaded
task list. The scope ended up being pretty accurate though a lot of things came
up during the last couple of weeks which I will explain below in “What went
wrong”.
Development
I wanted to keep everything as clean as possible in the code early
on while allowing myself the most flexibility for the systems as possible. Everything seemed to come together really
well each week albeit the bugs that came up. The bugs are to be expected
though. The network functionality in regards to the connectivity and
authentication was a bit troublesome which I’ll explain below but other than
that once we got past the hurdle everything functioned great and the
leaderboards received and stored scores perfectly. There wasn’t any
documentation for any of the code that I did or that was required so there’s
nothing to comment on there.
Some of the algorithms used for storing and searching for data
seemed to keep the optimization quite high. From the time I began development
to the time that I had assignments that required me to do performance testing,
there was never a time that I wasn’t considering the best performance or
optimization possible for the given circumstances. Due to this consideration
throughout the process of development, when I finally did come to those
assignments for performance and graphics testing, the tests passed with flying
colors. I never had any problems with performance or otherwise according to the
profiler in Unity.
Testing
Throughout development I was constantly testing the game as I
implemented new features to make sure everything as working properly. I was
able to catch most issues that would have come up through actual play testing
so that was something that I was rather proud of in the long run. There are
things that I wish I‘d caught ahead of time but I understand that we can’t
always be perfect, nor will anything ever be completely perfect. You win some
and you lose some unfortunately. Most of
the debugging that had to be done came through rather smoothly.
Business Model/Plan
N/A.
This is something that will be or is being handled by CelleC Games.
There isn’t any proposed business model or commercial plan that I am aware of
at this time.
The
Critique: What went wrong…
Design
& Aesthetics
In regards to challenges,
there weren’t any real challenges for me because I wasn’t responsible for
anything to do with the design, the mechanics, the balancing, or any of the
aesthetics behind the game. I was responsible for implementing same design,
mechanics, and aesthetic assets but weren’t responsible for creating them.
There were some minor
problems or inconsistencies that I noticed with the design along the way though.
There was some missing information in regards to some things that required me
to wait for design decisions in order to proceed with implementation. Some of
this was very minor such as the amount of health the player started with and
some of it was pretty major such as an incomplete level and misinformation with
certain mechanics and how things operated. These were taken care of within a
week or two of bringing the issues up but occasional there were some things
that caused delays in me being able to get things done. This wasn’t major
enough to force me to fall behind on much but was more of an annoyance than
anything.
Implementing the UI seemed
to cause a bit of problems though early on. I couldn’t get the UI to scale
properly with different resolutions. I had never used Unity’s new UI system so
I was unaware of exactly how it worked. I was trying to scale things with
resolution in the code itself, which was proving to be a bit more difficult
than it should have been because I had to keep calculating new bounds depending
on the height and width of the display. Using the new UI system within Unity 5
was a whole lot easier and seemed to work rather well once done properly.
With regards to
implementing the aesthetics, we had some pixilation issues with some of the
artwork. So in order to fix those issues we had to enable some lower
compression settings that caused storage space to rise quite a bit. This also
happened with the audio. Since using higher compressed audio formats caused the
music tracks not to loop properly, we were forced to use the lowest compression
format possible and that also caused storage space to rise a lot. Near the end
we were approaching a nearly 135MB APK file which is completely unnecessary for
the type of project we have. I’ve personally seen games with way better
graphics and quite a larger scope with a lot smaller storage usage.
Project Management
There wasn’t much of anything that went wrong with project
management. The system put in place was awesome. However in regards to personal
project management, there were a few issues that came up throughout development
where members of the team wouldn’t follow proper chain of command and seemed to
want to take authority over the Producer and make decisions without his consent
simply because they were also in a lead position. They seemed to not understand
that they were in a lead position over their particular department and the
Producer had the final say in decisions over the entire project. So this caused
some disagreements within the team occasionally but not enough to be a major
problem or cause any development delays.
What did seem to cause delays was issues with having a proper art
pipeline. The person who was responsible for being Lead Artist didn’t actually
commit to doing a lot of their responsibilities. Either because they had no
experience or knowledge on how to do some of those responsibilities or because
they were busy with other projects. In any case though this proved to be
something that caused a lot of delays because I had to step in and also be a
liaison between implementation and the artists in addition to my own
responsibilities. What should have been taking place is the Lead Artist should
have been working more closely with the artists, providing feedback toward their
work, and then taking final art and importing it into Unity to test and make
sure it worked properly before labeling it “Ready for Game” and giving it to me
to implement into the game. Instead I was getting little more than placeholder
artwork a lot of times and then having to go back and forth with the artists
myself multiple times and then having to wait on the Lead Artist to give the go
ahead to get something final. This was a very stressful process and caused a
lot of delays and forced me to do heavy crunches in the end in order to even
get things properly functional. This almost caused me to fail the last
development class had I not stayed up for almost 2 days straight getting things
done. I will still missing some things but luckily the instructor say all of
the work that I did do for the final milestone and gave me the benefit of the
doubt.
In my opinion the final artwork should have been finished and
sound/music should have been started way before the last two weeks of
development. This also caused some delays because of the issues we had with
storage space that was being used up by the audio and artwork. The
aforementioned pixilation issues and being forced to use the lowest compression
settings for audio forced me to have to spend a couple days on just trying to
get the storage usage down. The assets not being worked on until almost the end
of development was the major cause for these delays toward the end. Had the
assets been finished by the beginning of the final development month, we would
have had ample time for additional play testing and debugging and the game
would have been released on October 3rd right on schedule. Instead
it had to be delayed until October 31st.
Development
The only development issues that I had throughout all three months
of development were the authentication issues with the leaderboard system. It
took a couple of weeks of messing around on the Google Play Services
developer’s console in order to get things working properly. In the end, the
problems ended up being that I had to create my own unique key store file and
upload everything properly to my developer account, set it up for testing, and
then add in the Google Play email addresses that were allowed to access the
leaderboards.
Testing
There
wasn’t anything that really went wrong with testing. Any of the testing
sessions that we had ended rather well with at least a small list of bugs that
were added to a Google Docs Excel spreadsheet that we used to track them. There was a bit of concerns that I personally
had with the testing feedback that I received though. It wasn’t anything major
I guess, but it would have been really helpful to have more information
provided about bugs that were found. In a lot of cases I received very minimal
feedback in how the bug happened, how it was to be reproduced, how it should
work properly, etc. In one particular case, the bug reported was “The result
screen is too big”. Okay, this was a proper bug explanation; the result screen
was too big. But then in the section where there is supposed to be an
explanation on how to resolve the bug, the comment was “The paper should have
the regular size.” I had no idea what “the regular size” was or how to get the
regular size. I was using the same size in the same resolution that was
provided to me by the artists. Just one other way that me having to step in to
do some Lead Art responsibilities caused issues, because the Lead Artist found
issues with things that the artists gave me and since she didn’t do her role
efficiently, she called them “bugs” and blamed me for things not working as
intended.
Business
Model/Plan
Again
there was no planned business or commercial model.
Summary:
In my opinion this version
of the project didn’t differ much at all from the initial ideal. I believe this
turned out to be just as good as the intended ideal was supposed to be, aside
from the extra polish of camera animations that didn’t make the cut. From here
the project will end up being published by CelleC Games on October 31st
to the Google Play Store and to the Apple App Store. The only things left to do
at this point is to fix up a couple remaining bugs which shouldn’t take long at
all. They will definitely be fixed up before the release date. I can’t say that
I really learned a lot throughout this project and the development thereof. The
most I learned is how to use Google Play Services and the Google Play Developer
Console as I had never used it before this project. In regards to
functionality, programming, or implementation, I didn’t really learn anything
at all because of the extensive programming experience that I came into the
project with already.
In regards to project
management, I definitely learned that people who are in specific roles in your
team need to be fully aware and accepting of the responsibilities of their
particular role and have experience with and the ability to carry out those
responsibilities in order to make sure the team as a whole operates as
efficiently as possible. Also I learned that is does not pay off to wait until
the very end to start getting final assets ready for implementation. The
earlier we start to get things in place, even if it is placeholders, the better
off we’ll be near the end when we need to get final art in. Placeholders are
great to test implementation and make sure scaling, resolution, theme, style,
and the usage of space all matches up. If this would have been done, I can
guarantee that things would have went way smoother in the end.
The things I would do
differently revolve more around the project management than any implementation
or development on my part. If I could go back, I would definitely make sure
that everyone could perform his or her roles properly before starting. But
since I was brought into the team, I kind of had to work with what I had. I would
also make sure that development was at least started on the assets to get some
initial artwork into the game as early on as possible we were rushing to get
final art in within the last two weeks.
I don’t have too many plans
for the future in regards to mobile development. It’s not something I’ve
considered beyond graduation at this point. My main goals of this Master’s
program and the Capstone were to get the experience necessary to take a mobile
game from concept to release/publish. I actually want to focus more on
Environment Art in the future as I’ve been working hard to build a solid
portfolio in that area as well. I’m glad I had the opportunity to work with
CelleC Games and intern with them and I do plan to do some more work with them
if I’m welcomed to do so. If the chance arises, I would definitely take the
chance to work in a mobile development company on a more permanent and
professional manner.
References
CelleC Games. (2015). Spell Book (Version 3.1) [Android
Game]. Winter Park, FL: CelleC
Games.
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