Post Mortem: What went right!

• Translating real life mechanics into game mechanics. In essence, we took what the arm offered us, combined it with how the patients would use it and then created the mechanics for our game. The process of taking all the elements and concluding them to what would now be our core game went very smooth, as all decisions seemed very logical thanks to the great base of research we had done.
• The additive process and checkpoints. Every two weeks we had a milestone in which we would have a next version of the game ready. Because we were more or less finishing added features to the game every two weeks too, it was possible to remove 60% of our game just 4 weeks before deadline without any trouble, giving us the opportunity to focus on what was truly important for the game and to prove the concept we had been working on in the past months. Fortunately there was enough room for this hacking and slashing – killing your darlings is painful, but we have to stay realistic!
• Implementing research into game design. Having one designer (read: one guy who takes the final design decisions) on the team that is also the man on the research appeared to work great. Because we did research specifically for game-related information and issues, a lot of data could directly be distilled into our game, e.g. the length of the game, how instructions work, calibrating, role of the therapist, etc.
• External help. There are always people who can do something better than you do. Asking for help is never wrong. I think we were very lucky to have Lies van Roessel as our supervisor as she got us help from all around.
• From exchange student to sound designer. I think none of us even though of Eri, our exchange student from Japan, becoming this good at audio design. She literally started with zero knowledge of audio and music in games and managed to fully equip our game with immersive game sounds and effect which most of them, she recorded herself. She created sound moodboards and already knew in the early phase of the game how it was supposed to sound like. Again, she couldn’t have done it without the external help of audio designer Richard van Tol, who gave her lessons and critique on her audio design.

Post Mortem: What went wrong!

• Scattered group. During the whole project, we had 2 part time programmers. If you have ever made a video game, you know where most of the work and effort goes into; code. We met the programmers two days a week which was the bare minimum, and emailed most of the remaining days. Eventually, I had to help the programmers with lots of game code to make sure we would make it, which was not the ideal setup since I was slacking on design tasks in the meanwhile.
  Beside this unlucky fact, a major mistake that we made was ‘finalizing’ the concepts of the game without the programmers involved. They missed most of the concept phase because of their busy schedule and thereby did not feel as much connected as all the full-time members. I wonder if there was anything we could have done to prevent this – the project had to continue and we couldn’t wait for the programmers.
• Unspoken expectations about each other. The tension was incredibly high sometimes because we did not talk about ‘what was normal’ at the beginning of the project. As the team coordinator, I tried to keep everyone motivated and effective at work, and though I had a good idea about what ‘hard work’ included. I mistakenly asked team members to stop having fun during our project days and found out that there are many different work styles one can have. If we had just gone through this quickly at the beginning, none of this would have been an issue.
• Few world iteration. We had a round world which made it particularly difficult for the world artist to iterate on it. And lets be honest, lack of motivation did not make it any better. It also came to my mind that, when you go into crunch time not fully motivated, you are going to have a problem finishing your work.
• Documentation. Nobody was checking the design wiki, I had a lonely time in there… All communication was done outside the wiki, which is not a problem at all, but it did make the documentation redundant. Art used their wiki to put together their images, which did seemed to work fine.
• Vision-less weeks during production. At some point in our process we stopped using our vision as the main argument of our choices. I think we were lucky that we eventually had the game vision that we wanted all implemented. Next time, I’d rather not leave it to luck and keep the vision of the game I’m working on in the back of my mind all the time…
• Mid-project Media Management students. I don’t know who at our school thought it would be a good idea to involve first-year media management students with the project while there was already good coordination and a steady planning. It was a stupid idea, they did not even show up most of the times.

Team KOMODO!

Supervisors:

Vogels! Exhibiting!

Many were interested in our game at the Cross Care Cafe, organised by Izovator.

Team KOMODO together. Francis his birthday was a lot of fun

At the Festival of Games 2010, our game was a huge success!

Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac Man, observes our hardware while playing the game

Totally unexpected, we win the Diamond trophy, 'Best-of-show' award of the Festival of Games, together with an iPad! Picture by Zuraida Buter...

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