170 - Postmortem - Group 7



Group 7 - Voyager


Voyager was supposed to be a game inspired by some single-player roleplaying games, where the focus is on journaling and writing out a story using dice and cards as an Oracle, to direct where the writing should go and provide a randomized, loose understanding of what the plot should be like. However, this changed during the process of development. Rayen wanted to include a math-like puzzle game, where players had to figure out how to navigate a grid of numbered cells within an exact amount of moves. I thought this would work perfectly, not realizing that it'd be extremely limiting when applied in that context. I wanted to avoid linearity and create necessary detours, twits, and turns. All with clever writing and a sense of ridiculousness informed by weird sci-fi analogies turned literal, similar to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and old satirical point and click games like Space Quest.

Some entries would be informed by sci-fi novels and other media. A Hard Science fiction story about a planet composed of Wang Tiles became the basis for one entry. The every-popular Grey Goo scenario makes an appearance. Many parts of the lists are sci-fii references, cute philosophical problems, and chaotic  and intention grabbing sequences ripped off of programming errors and cosmic horror.

I was not able to detail my expectations for my teammates well. In a few situations, I would be the only one to work on the game until the eleventh hour. This is mostly not my teammate's fault, as I often did not clearly communicate milestones and game ideas. I did not give them objectives to complete or any direction, and since they let me take over the project and steer it, that was absolutely my failure.

In the future, I would like to work as a lead designer again, but with a much heavier focus on scheduling and creating simple, easy to understand tasks and milestones for my teammates. While they didn't do much, I have a feeling most of it was due to me not giving them good instructions as a pre-determined leader.

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