Wolfgang: Postmortem

Wolfgang is done! Or rather, we have turned it in. It is still not finished by a long shot, and we plan on making some improvements after winter break. But anyway, without further ado: Wolfgang

Before continuing on to the postmortem, I should explain what our goal was with Wolfgang. Our assignment was to create a unique game as our semester project. With a focus on creativity, our group (Matt, myself, and John Lloyd (another St. Mary's student)), decided to try something a little bit different.

We decided to concentrate on immersion instead of gameplay. These two things are by no means mutually exclusive, and more often than not go hand in hand, but due to our time restrictions we decided to focus on immersion. For our artwork we went with a surreal nightmare look because we knew that if we attempted a realistic look the results would be laugh. We slimmed down the controls to a bare minimum, so that they would not distract non-gamers. We also decided to have no HUD. The only thing on your screen is your player and the environment.

To achieve this, and still be able to lead the player to the cabin in the middle of the woods, we used audio cues to guide them. If you needed to go left, there is a voice that tells you just that. This feature was both criticized and praised. Praised as a unique and interesting way to incorporate sound, but criticized for limiting the accessibility of the game. Fortunately we can resolve the accessibility issue by adding visual cues, but then we run into the issue of how to do that without sacrificing our original goal of increasing player immersion. I am curious to see what we come up with for our next release.

Now on to what we did wrong. First of all, I am embarrassed to say this, but we did not use any sort of version control. We knew that this was a bad idea when we started, and now we know from experience why. I doubt that I need to expand further on our difficulties and I can offer no legitimate excuse, so I will move on.

In my mind, another glaring flaw is the third person viewpoint. A first person view would have been much more immersing, but here we decided on the third person view so that you could easily see the wolves chasing you. In the current build though, wolves don't chase you, they just come straight at you. While there was no way to anticipate having to cut the chasing wolves, I am now wondering if they would even work well with a third person view. I would like to experiment with a first person camera for the next release. It should not be difficult to do, since the game is now in 3D.

Which brings me to our next mistake: trying to write a 3D engine. Originally we had decided on making the game in a puesdo 3D, much like Wolfenstien 3D. Everything would actually be in 2D, but we would scale and translate our objects to make them appear to be in three dimensions. After spending far to much time on it, we realized that we were basically creating our own 3D engine. I found myself going to my Vector Calculus Professor far to much, and we were being bogged down re-inventing the wheel. Finally we switched to 3D, and within a day we had the game looking better than it did after a month's worth of work. Trying 2D turned into even more of a time sink than the artwork.