Postmortem: Hymn of the Sands

Time management:  We knew exactly the amout of time we had left, had decent project visibility during the majority of development, and had learned to plan accordingly.

Design feedback: The Level Design team in worked particularly well providing collaborative feedback on each others' work.

Archetypes: Our programmers were quick to create a range of adaptable archetypes the level designers would use to develop the abilities and enemies in the game, meaning that if a level designer wanted to experiment with making the upgrade to the Blink decrease its cooldown, the designer could do it himself on the fly.

Cross-discipline assistance and communication: Our Capstone room was typically a lively and active place.  An designer would be sitting with an artist during an art pass showing him how to avoid Kismet warnings, while a programmer was getting feedback on the HUD from the game designer.

Ownership: Everyone felt a part of the game.  The Level Designers largely got to work on the elements they liked best, the artists got to "art pass" the game, giving them a lot of influence on the overall look and feel, and the programmers had their hands in nearly every element if they wanted.  And all of this was done without drama or posessiveness.

Team playtests: Regular times were set aside for us to play the game as a group and as individuals, offering good project visibility. 

Organization and communication before Vertical Slice:  At the earliest points of development, the project vision wasn't particularly clear and agreed-upon.  Multiple design ideas were still in the air and the team wasn't entierly sure how much puzzle or action was in our puzzle/action game.

Learning while doing: As the first student project of this scope for most of the members of the team, there was a large learning curve.  Animation was being learned during development, much of the HUD and controls development details were new, and we had to dynamically adjust scope during development as we learned what we were capable of.

Didn't explore mechanics fully: Now at the end of the project, we see huge opportunities for developing our game mechanics further, if only we had the time to delve deeper.  There are game elements we already have in place we can now see have fun gameplay potential that simply didn't get explored.

 Approval pipeline breakdown: One of the drawbacks of a team that freely and happily talks to anyone and everyone is that the roles of the leads sometimes get overlooked for the sake of expediency.  This led to a few examples of a lead being surprised by new content when they should not have been.

More playtesting, and more mini-milestones: As much as we tried to emphasize playtesting, it's inevitible that we wished there were more.

LDs could have leaned more on programmers: Our level designers would find elaborate ways to get UDK to bend to their will.  And as much cross-discipline communication as we had, sometimes things would get overlooked.  After an LD showed us their newest success, a programmer would sometimes ask, "Why didn't you just ask me?  I could have gotten that to work in ten minutes."

More solidity/strong leadership during pre-production: There was at least a little team stress  early in the project where uncertainty in the design and theme led to some passive-agressive conflicts that had to be worked out over time.

Breakfast: Our post-mortem discussions kept heading back toward "we all worked better when someone brought food" for some reason.  I think it's because Andrew brought us french toast this morning.