Chapter 12 - A Postmortem: Capital Vice

Well to put it bluntly our team was cut. Feel free to watch our presentation, which is below as I will be referencing parts of it in this Postmortem!

THE GOOD

​I prefer to start off with what went well for the project, as the good should be highlighted first!

Starting off for the Good of Capital Vice is our use of systems. I think our team really nailed down making our game as easy to expand upon as possible, which if we did end up making it through, would allow the game to grow rapidly in the second semester.

Another thing I think we did incredibly well was Iteration. We used every single QA session possible to rapidly fix bugs and implement new features. Our team was so efficient that we were almost too efficient at some points!

We also handled communication incredibly well. Our slack channel was always lively and every member of the team would constantly be checking it to make sure we could answer any question when needed.

THE BAD

Our game was too complicated for the professors to understand on demo night (hence why we were cut). The game needed to be a bit simpler. While I say this it is important to point out that simplicity was never going to happen with this team.

Our game also was hard to create. We were doing both networking and using a new system (GAS) to make the game. Networking alone takes a ton of time to work with, but GAS was a whole other monster. While Dustin and I learned a ton by using GAS, we also used a ton of time for 2 entire sprints just learning how to use it well for our game. We didn’t even really get to do some cool stuff with it that we had learned because of the need to play it safe with networking.

The Capstone process as a whole was also a bit of a mess. The requirements for each “Phase” were never entirely clear, and the Syllabus for the class was a behemoth. It never seemed like the documents we needed to turn in for class work made sense as actual game documents. I had a huge red flag early on when I learned that a GDD (Game Design Document) was NOT a requirement for the class.

​Those are the three things I really wanted to highlight about Capital Vice for good and bad. The presentation days had their ups and downs as well. As for the actual presentation, the picture above is actually all of my notes I had with me while presenting. I had a whopping 18 cards, with the 12 blue ones being just for the 2 minute video on its own! I think we did a pretty good job with the presentation. Some of the faculty were not happy that we didn’t dive into our game very much, but we chose to do this as they would literally be playing the game the next night, and our game did not show off just the ridiculous amount of work we put into setting up our backend. (haha, I just made another unintentional butt joke!)

​As for demo night I was actually home in Texas already, with my stomach full of tacos. We actually found out the results for cuts right as we were picking up my mom from the airport later that evening. Not being at demo night has been a weird thing to look back on as I was supposed to be in the room, but I didn’t want to risk flying out of the Burlington Airport the day before Thanksgiving (something always goes wrong in that airport on that day). I can now say without a doubt that me being there would not have changed the outcome. Hell, I probably would actually be more frustrated right now if I was there, because after talking to just about everyone it was not a fun time for any of the teams (even the ones that survived).

After being turned to dust by the faculty’s snap of the Infinity Gauntlet everything went dark for a few days...

Then all of a sudden a Wrong Warp (Games) appeared and pulled me into the next semester!

SAY HELLO TO ARACHNOTRON!!!

I will be working on Arachnotron this spring as a Level Designer and the Quality Assurance Lead!

To be continued in January of 2019