Post-Mortem

After closing up the final details of the project, the team gathered for an overall retrospective of the project where we exposed and analyzed the different things that we consider went well, those others who could have been improved, and general comments about the project and the experience. These are the thoughts and quotes extracted from that retrospective.

What went well

Team bonding
Due to COVID-19 all team sessions and meetings were done online, which complicated communicating and bonding as a team and made us prone to create toxic dynamics. However, during the 4 months of production we managed to mantain daily connection through our Discord server not only during work time, but also during our own spare time. Consequently, that kept our communication and bond tighter, and helped a lot to lift the group's motivation.

"I would consider we built a good environment within the possibilities"

Awareness and tenacity
As a team, we have encountered many difficulties during the production of the game and, even though we had very strong limitations such as time, a barely developed engine, general lack of personal motivation from half of the team and too high expectations or comparisons, the team proudly agreed that we managed pretty decently to get around some of them and deliver and create a fun experience. We do not put these limitations as an excuse, as we are aware of the full potential of the project and everything that it could have been. What makes us proud is that we did not let that get through us and instead we invested more time on finding different solutions that could express our game idea the best way possible with the resources available.

"Despite having to cut down a lot of features because of the lack of time, we have been able to redirect the project successfully"

Project direction & working pipeline
After recognizing the different mistakes to improve upon, we appreciated that, specially around the final stage of the project, we managed to end up with highly improved work pipelines. Having programmers working in parallell while not only implementing gameplay but whole high-level systems from scratch; artists creating pretty decent assets that followed a cohesive art style although their very little experience at the start of the project; and designers working as a well-organized department expanding and testing the game concept while also covering for other department's flaws or limitations.

"Programming team was able to work in parallel in a satisfactory manner"
"After all the versions, we managed to get a somehow cohesive art style"
"We managed to do quite a bit of iteration"

What could be improved

Lack of care, implication, & commitment
We are aware that our class does not particulary shine for having a majority with general implication for the university and its projects, which can be very frustating for other that do want to take it more seriously. And during this project where we stopped being a class and became a team is where that aspect was most noticed. That resulted in an overall sensation of lack of care and understanding of the importance of the project, which obligated the other motivated and focused half of the team to take up almost all of the tasks and ending up very fed up with the project. It was also noticed with the results delivered where we would detect a huge lack of proactivity, research, and iteration of the features or assets being produced, which led to other people having to constantly redo other people's tasks. As a team, we had different opinions about it, but overall the two main points were that we should had invested more time on either the production instead of getting into pointless arguments that only created negative environments, or in finding a way to motivate those members as much as we could so they would not stop producing, even though it would not be with the same rythym as the rest.

"Some members clearly didn't understand what makes this subject different from the rest, which led to some problems"

Persistancy & Resolve
As our first experience with being part of a project with 24 people, it took us a while to adopt the most suitable pipelines and to adapt to working 30h a week while still taking the rest of classes. As a consequence, we were not very persintent with our work which caused us almost half of the milestones. Mainly because due to organization issues, we would have to crunch a lot for a milestone and that caused general exhaustion that we would not totally overcome until the next milestone. We evaluated that having a more constant but healthier work rutine would had allowed us to mantain better productivity.

"Persistance throughout the entire project. There were a lot of deliveries where we did not work as well/hard as the others."

Respecting timing & schedule
As the production of the game advanced, we got better at task management by timing every task instead of making only milestone goals, and we even implemented a review system to mantain it. However, although we wanted to stick to them, our ambition to add more things to the project made us more flexible with them. That affected builds not being tested, people making constant excuses to not work since there were not instant consequences to it, and most of the implementations happening the weekend previous to the delivery. We understand that if we had been more strict with them, we would had been able to react earlier to adjusting the scope, and we would have had more stable milestones.

"Respecting the deadlines. If we need something by day 13, it MUST be done by day 13"

General thoughts and conclusions

Frustrations
We felt like we have always been very limited and behind on everything no matter how much work we put in, and we lost so much motivation on the way due to feeling disrespected by each other because either being very negative and toxic, or not putting in the effort and work the project and our teammates deserved.

"There were multiple instances during the project where the morale of the team sunk underground and below due to many pointless arguments, missing teammates and a general hostile disposition among teams."

Lessons
One of the brighter aspects of the project that was mentioned more often during the retrospective was the general feeling of learning and improvement. Even those that didn't get the chance to work on their preferred aspect of the game, admitted having learned so much from participating in the project.

"If we had know what we know now from the start, oh boy would it be a different game."

Producer's Conclusion
As the role of Producer I feel as I have acquired a general view of the project that allows me to come to the conclusion that after working 4 months in a project like this done in a custom engine with barely any systems, the project was extremely challenging for all of us but we also got to learn so much, and for those who actually put in the effort, it also brought us closer as a team. I can say we all agree that although we are aware and hope the game will get a lot feedback, and that it might be missing a lot of features that some other Rogue-Lites might, we truly believe it ended up being FUN, which at the end of the day is what we look for and why we are proud of it.

"It might not seem like it because we have always been given too high expectations, but with the very limited resources we had (human and technological), we managed to end up with a fun & decent experience"