Looking back to our beta stage, we are proud of how Piet's Puzzles has come along. There were great things and some things we wish were done differently. They are all here in this Postmortem devlog. 

Successes:

We have successfully created a full working game with introductory scenes and five levels. The tasks were split between each member of the group and we used feedback from in-class milestones to make improvements along the way. Main features of our game include: touch swipe, puzzle escape, swipe limit, coin collection for score, and more. Below is a summary of some successful factors of our project.

All of our levels have working mechanics with unique puzzles. There are sprites and animations such as player eye, coins, and backgrounds. There is also a consistent color and block theme that replicates the esthetic design of Piet Mondrian paintings. We created a storyline for players to better understand the objective of the game. The mini Piet starts out at this house and the goal is to help him successfully get through his day. This information is written in the introductory scene with typewriter effect. There is also a menu scene to let players explore different levels if wanted. We received feedback that our background music fits the theme well and varies based on level. There are sound effects for entering the next level, swipes, and coin collection to add interaction. There are additional functions like swipe limit code to encourage the player to plan his or her move more carefully. In levels 3 and 5 there is a portal functionality to increase the difficulty and add a unique aspect to the game. The portal is redesigned so players can identify it better. No instruction was added so the player can explore and find out on his or her own. We have playtested our game multiple times and made sure that our game fit on the mobile screen with the right resolution and working functions.

Challenges:

Some challenges we had were focusing on particular ideas and minimizing scope of game to keep the minimalistic look while having all necessary functions to keep players entertained. We also had problems with using Unity collaborations. It took us many debugging sessions and playtesting to resolve the issues. Below is a summary of all the challenges we faced during development of this game.

In the alpha stage of the game, we couldn't decide exactly what type of game we wanted to create. It took a couple of group meetings and a test scene until we set on the idea of a moving paint block escaping Mondrian-styled paintings. Most importantly, implementing swipe control was a challenge. The game looks very simple but it took us multiple tries to allow for smooth touch transitions of the block and make sure the character doesn’t zoom off the screen. 

Each group member was assigned one level each. We had to make sure the level difficulty increases but also let the player complete within the swipe limit. So we planned out each level ahead of time. We were constantly deciding between implementing a timer or swipe limit. After hearing the feedback, we decided to implement swipe limit as the main feature but also have the timer to provide extra challenge. In addition, we coordinated the direction that mini Piet enters and exits to make the game look cohesive.  Initially, we planned not to have any graphical backgrounds. But we felt this was way too simple and limited the design scope of our game. So themed background images were added to highlight the storyline. But some of the pictures didn’t fit the overall artistic style of the game which we later changed. 

Using Plastic SCM to sync was a huge challenge. We were originally using Unity Collab but Unity decided to no longer support in the middle of our project. All of us had to download Plastic and in the process, we had missing files, merge conflicts, and more. Right before the final presentation, some of our buttons stopped working. The original order of scenes were startscene -> story scene/ menu scene -> levels -> endscene. But we weren’t able to go to the menu or story scene. It was later fixed. Some of the texts were blurry when we built it to run on our phones. We had to adjust the pixel per unity size from 1 to 150 and also kept a fixed resolution of 1920 x 1080 for all canvas. 

What you learned:

Through the process we have learned various things about unity, sprite design, and user experience. Below is a list of things we have learned.

One of the biggest things is learning to use Plastic SCM. It is very similar to Github desktop except it is unique for Unity. At first, it was confusing but after all of our members got the hang of it, we were able to work with it. We learned how to build and test play for iOS mobile games. Some of our members had trouble building because of the M1 chip but we were able to figure out the issue. We also remembered to set screen size to 1920 x 1080 so the edge of the background is not shown. 

We also got to play with touch and swipe functionality which was a little different from the usual wasd games we were making before. For the aesthetic design, background and animation of the game should be cohesive and follow the same pixel or graphic format so the user to feel comfortable. For example, we heard feedback that our exit sign looked a little bit off. We fixed the issue afterwards. Planning ahead to design the puzzles was important. Some levels got too difficult and impossible to pass. We had to adjust the format design so the player could complete the level.

As a team, we learned to communicate better. We also set up a schedule and divided tasks accordingly so we can finish in time. Then we met as a group to help resolve each other’s conflict and discuss the overarching theme together. 

Possible future revisions:

Because the limitation of time, there are features that we strongly believe will enrich the game, but were not able to implement. 

Potentially, we would like to introduce different kinds of scoring systems: by shortest time, least moves, most coins collected and earn stars in each system.  Player and purchase costumes for Little Piet (a bowtie, hat, or glasses), or unlock other themed levels with the stars they have. We also would like to add more animations to the player. Right now Mini Piet has an idle animation. We want to add extra animations for moving, and getting to the destination. One last thing we would like to add to the project are larger scaled maps. Right now, the maps fits in the screen. We want to create a harder level at the end where the player cannnot see the entire map, and has to swipe and adventure as they go.