Coopy Race's Postmortem

The Game:

Coopy Race is a 3-character marathon game on a procedurally generated level. Characters are running from a bee swarm and they must collaborate to reach the finish safe spot TOGETHER. Abilities are asymmetric and players have to defeat enemies and cross obstacles along the way.

Successes:

After efficient brainstorming and thoughtful discussion, we were able to blend elements of three different games and create a final product that was coherent, fun, and had the right amount of challenge. That only happened because we had our values clear and we didn’t let our bias toward our own individual games blind us.

We succeeded in providing a visual and sound design that was consistent and that would make sense to the players. This was important to guarantee that our game was fun and whimsical, instead of completely odd and strange. In fact, the characters blended enough with the game universe, to the point that the game is already attractive at first glance.

Finally, we provided our players with a game that has certain replayability and that is fun to play with friends. Going towards a procedurally generated level was definitely a win and allowed us to make the best use of our level. We can say most of our decisions were smart, and we were always considering playability, collaborativeness and scope.  Our goal was to develop a game that was doable, replayable, and fun, in those terms we succeeded. 

Failures & Struggles:

The low points in our development process are connected to efficiency, organization, and art direction. 

First, we struggled to place all characters in the same build. That happened due to a lack of standardization prior to our merging process, which caused lots of conflicts and such.  Also,  our individual codes had some particularities that some of us didn't quite understand. Since we didn't add thoughtful comments in our codes, we lost quite some time trying to understand the details of something that could be easier to track.

The art direction of the game was also tricky. We had characters that were very distant from the rest of the language and it took us quite some time to figure out a way of blending everything. Last but not least, part of the team was new in the unity engine world and in the versioning process. So it took a bit to find a good rhythm and make sure everyone knew the important tricks. 

Learned Lessons:

Aside from the regular 

• Understanding unity x creating a debugging pipeline
• Versioning is the future!
• Code comments are important!

Next Steps:

• Adding a “Choose your Character” screen.
• Signs of their controller keys
• Creating multiple game modes:
  • Long Run
  • Beat You
• Creating different skins to the level, one that references the individual world of each character.
• Improving controllers and allowing “online” gameplay w/ parsec
• If the enemies will attack, Bunny can have a shield function