Daniel Cunningham Post Morterm

Daniel Cunningham
Game 420
August 27, 2009

Post Mortem
The first thing that went right was everyone got assigned to the right position. Everyone who got assigned to each job was good and experienced at what they were did except for me. I had a steep learning curve. Tom, he knew a little about Action Script, but he had to learn more in addition to trigonometry. Justin was his right hand man and helped him code also. Joe is a level designer, but he had to learn how to make level maps. Adrianna and Malina learn and did UI interface and GUI interface for the whole game.
The second thing that went right was we had to pick an art style. We picked from three different art styles which were from the 70’s, 80’s and the 90’s. Eventually, we found art style for Zalien and the dinosaurs. Shelby’s art style itself dealt with black outlines with color inside of them. To even know that this art style would be carried throughout the whole game that the artist had to mimic.
The third thing that went right was the environment art. The environment art had three people working on it, Todd, Me, and Christy. A lot of good things came out of it. She made thorns on the ground, crystals, and vines. Todd did the tar pit, caves, trees, and rocks. For me, I did the ground and cave roots. All the pieces we brought to the table brought the level to life.
The fourth thing that went right was the animations. Christy, Todd, and Shelby had to learn the basic of animation. Without those three learning animation, we would’ve never got the game done. They spent days and nights of learning how to make a creature move, Zalien move. They all benefited from this experience because now they can go into any application that has animation and do it with no problem.
The fifth thing that went right was sound. The sound itself was special to me. I had to learn it from the first game production class. I worked on a lot of sound from tar pit sounds to Zalien’s death. I also learned a new program, Acid. Acid kept me busy with fixing sound, editing drop offs and pickups. Also editing volume to the sound that was created.
The first thing that went wrong was the ground. Me not knowing Flash how I was suppose to; the level 1 ground toke longer than expected. My first problem was turning everything into one movie clip. I didn’t like redoing the ground over and over which wasted precious time that could’ve been spent working on fixing sound.
The second thing that went wrong was flash itself. Flash hampered the sound because none of the sound made it into the game. Flash as a program, it wouldn’t recognize the bounding box for sounds and they didn’t respond to Zalien running into sound bounding boxes. It would either do two things, the sound wouldn’t play or it would go into a continuous loop.
The third thing that went wrong was losing three weeks of work. We were working in version 30 to version 26 and it got corrupted. We had to fix everything all over to get back to our once lost version 30 from version 25. That was the only thing that went wrong with the game as a whole. But the only thing that I would have changed would have to be working in flash. It was really a hard time for me getting to do the ground in the first level and just doing it over and over. It just became something that I didnt want too do sometimes but I didn't want to let my team down. I may have wasted a lot of time doing the ground but I have to say that we did rock the socks and I would love to work with you guys in the future but not in flash it is too much of a pain for me. I also think working in a team was something that we had to learn,we have done it before in small groups but it was 9 of us and sometimes I was like this is crazy how are 9 people going to work together? But in the end we got a product and it was good. I think these 10 weeks made us stronger and closer and I am glad I got to know you all. Thanks again.