Dec 9th, 2023 ~ Postmortem

What did you change from the initial plan? 

We originally wanted to add several unique floors to the game, but it quickly became apparent that such an undertaking would be too daunting considering how busy everyone was with their own game projects this quarter. We always had the plan of making a city for the setting of the game and we felt that there was much that could be done with making a surrealist office building. One of the original concepts we had with the game was that the player would fight against three bosses which represent the business executives of the corporation; the name of the game, Troika Incorporated, would’ve reinforced this design choice.

Another one of the ideas that we had for the project was to create a supermarket and have the player participate in a store-wide food fight amongst the customers and staff. Although the idea of picking up objects in a store to use in a food fight was amusing, we concluded that the amount of AI and mechanics in that game would be too ambitious within the scope of our development time. This became more apparent as our project’s scope evolved, leaving many of these ideas to the wayside for the sake of meeting deadlines. However, the ideas made from this project could find refuge and be reborn in future projects or endeavors.

What went right with your final project?

The aspects of our project that went well were the general aesthetic and design goals of the project; this includes its office setting and tone and the implementation of various floors that would require the player to think and play like a surrealist. During playtesting, our game was praised for its use of a liminal aesthetic and our team was encouraged to continue with this theme.

Our game felt inspired and truly a unique experience to behold once you take the chance to jump right into it. We are proud to have incorporated silly ideas in each floor while imagining how an office worker would react to the surreal environment that he enters when climbing up another floor.

What went wrong with your final project?

Aside from design and scope changes as the deadlines drew closer, nothing in particular went wrong with this project. While additional time to work on our project in terms of adding more polish and additional challenging floors would be appreciated, the project, in its current state, is more than satisfactory to the team.

What would you do differently next time?

If we had another opportunity to work on this project, we would add additional floors and incorporate boss fights into our game. We wanted the boss fights to be less conventional in gaming tropes and more abstract in accordance with the game’s themes and design goals. To emphasize surrealism, we’d have quirky and unorthodox boss battles that consist of paying for micro-transactions or finding a way to “break the system” in order to “win” the boss fight.

In a way, our game would’ve become a lot more meta and focusing on meta gameplay mechanics to progress the game. However, a lot changed throughout the development of the game. For example, our game started to have a bigger focus on adding NPCs and interactable objects into the game that changed the feel of our game. I feel like if we had more time to work on the project, we’d make the game more interactive with both the objects and characters that exist in the surrealist world of this game.

If you could add one more week of development, what would you add?

With an additional week of development time, our team would be able to implement additional floors and allocate time to create interesting, surreal mechanics to enhance our “surrealist sandbox” theme.

We’ve also got plenty of polish to incorporate into our player movement such as creating smoother jumps that don’t feel “floaty” and adjusting the camera sensitivity to be more enjoyable with the player. Including more accessibility options into the settings is something that we wanted to include into the project as well in order to improve the overall gameplay experience.