!Bird Postmortem

Over the span of this project we have learned a lot working together as a team, as well as in each of our specific roles. We began with a bit ambitious expectations but in the end managed to make something we are all proud of. The art and level design, sound and narrative and mechanics all blended together to create what we envisioned at the beginning of the project. 

For scripting, although it took a while to get the character controller polished, the other systems came together nicely and added a lot more depth to game play. We're proud at how the targeting and scope turned out for game play as well as story wise, adding to the joke and immersion that you are actually a robot drone completing tasks for the government. Collision gave us some issues but changing it to destroying the bird and respawning a new one was a clever workaround. If we could have continued working I think we would have tweaked the movement just a bit more and added multiple speeds for the bird.

The art and level design came together really nicely, and the only complaint was implementing some of the assets was very time consuming. We tried making the city feel real, with distinct sections that also made affordances for infrastructure. All of our art came from a single asset pack, which made it easy to have a stylistic cohesion and over the course of development we learned a lot about environmental storytelling. Looking back we should have taken more time to research tilemaps to make it easier to implement assets, but overall we are proud of how the level looks and feels to the player.

Sound and narrative was a big plus, and added a lot of polish to our original, quite basic game play loop. All of the sounds fit well within our existing systems, and the narrative was a great way to tie in all of the mechanics together and create a story that was engaging for the person playing. We received a lot of good feedback, and were constantly tweaking the story to give the player a purpose and drive for completing the missions while simultaneously setting up a twist at the end. Our one complaint was the inability to finish the story, and if we had more time we would give the plot a proper ending.

We believe that we sold the themes of the game quite well with the aesthetics in general. Our environment art combined with audio and UI all meshed well together and sold the plot element of the bird being a drone in a weird, offbeat world. Our main lament is that we didn't fully finish the story implementation the way we planned, especially since the plot twist went over quite well with our players.  In the end our project was met with good reception, and we look forward to showing off our hard work to more people!

- !BIRD dev team