Postmortem- The post 'game completion' phase

  We are finally through with our first prototype. I don’t know about myself but our professors are very proud of what we have done in just a period of one month. And, our first prototype did not end there. The last thing of all was the Postmortem. 

How Postmortem works:

  A line is drawn on a surface, dividing the complete line horizontally in 4 segments, one segment for one week. You, as a team member, are supposed to write on as many post-its as you want and stick them either on the upper part of the line or the lower. The upper part of the line is used for the things that went brilliant during the prototype and the lower half for the things that went bad or things that disappointed you. If the post-it is on the line then that means that particular activity was neither good nor bad.

 So, our postmortem had 19 post-its above the line and 11 post-its below the line. This seriously means that we had more of amazing stuff going on in our prototype than sad stuff. I was mostly complaining about the design process and how it should’ve been more defined and determined in the early stage itself.

     The whole point of developing prototypes is to iterate on the points which are not working good for the game. Meaning, if the game comes out to be very dull after the final stitches of the code then you are suppose to change those portions or mechanics of the game which makes your game boring. Frankly speaking, we never went that far as to iterate on the prototype. Even at the last minutes of the prototype completion cycle we were trying to make things just work, let alone iterate. Thanks to MOAI for making our lives sick with absolutely no concrete reference material.

 This first prototype taught me many things some of them being:

• The prototype is not a complete game but it’s a way of showing how everything in the game will work.  It does not have to be complete, or for that matters, polished. In short, it’s a demo.

• Team working manners.

• One Agile process which we are going to use from the next prototype onwards- SCRUM- A standup meeting.

• Good programming techniques and a little bit of frameworks and engines.