Meal Team 6 — Post Mortem
Project completed… Here’s what we accomplished!
Part of what makes the creative process exciting is not knowing exactly where a project will end. With unlimited time, a simple demo can balloon into a technical beast reaching well beyond the scope of the initial vision— at times, against the developer’s best interests! Deadlines are important to keep developers actively working towards well-defined goals and maintain the initial project vision.
In the case of Meal Team 6’s development, our goal was to apply the syllabus material of Creating Immersive Worlds Fall 2018, and learn how challenging creating a production-level game can be through first hand experience with Unreal Engine 4. Especially given the course deadline!
What we accomplished
Our game showcases two primary gameplay features: collecting items and interacting with characters. The player must search through a cluttered bedroom to spot their room key, and pick it up to get to the rest of the game. Once outside the room, across the hall there is an NPC named Bob the player can talk to. A dialogue tree leads the player down different paths of discussion. Once the discussion is over, the NPC may not be talked to again.
Using what we created as a framework, expanding the game world to create more encounters or puzzles would not be time consuming.
What we did not
Given more time, we would be able to improve the game in many ways. In terms of sound, adding effects when the player picks up an item or ambient apartment noise would have contributed to a feeling of immersion. Dialogue choices do not get stored in any meaningful way, so creating an impactful dialogue system would allow for a deeper decision-driven story. The program MagicaVoxel was used to create many of the assets in the game, but other textures and static meshes were created using built in Unreal Engine assets. Using a uniform style across assets and level design leads players to focus more on gameplay, rather than artistic liberties.
Wrapping up
We all went into this project with big ideas, and worked together to try and have everyone’s voice heard and implemented in the final product. Everyone used the opportunity as a learning experience, and grew as a team-developer. Even if the final product was not in the realm of what we had originally imagined, the finished product is something that stands by itself as a unique expression of our study.
Thanks to other members of the team, and thanks our Professor Christian Grewell!
P.S: We even got to put in our own Easter egg! It is a bit creepy, but very fitting for the finished game. 🤷♂️
