10. "Finished" Prototype

Previous To Do

I have amalgamated all the outstanding to-do items from my previous post below. As you can see, the list was pretty long.

• Add a splash sound effect when the player walks over water
• Substitute in actual sound effects in place of the placeholder ones for player footsteps
• Stop player movement whilst they are rewinding
• Search for a rewind time sound effect
• Create floor pad artwork and animations
• Shorten the door opening and closing animations
• Create artwork for the level completion goal/floor pad thing
• Start a UI bar for displaying amount of rewind time left
• Look into a screen effect for the rewind control - I'm imagining an old-school VHS rewind visual
• Finish the rewind UI bar
• Make a level select menu

Progress

I have unfortunately fallen out of love with this project. I no longer think the idea is that great, and it was just taking up so much time, and I have other interests that I wish to pursue. That being said, I wanted to get it into some form of finished state, otherwise the whole undertaking would have been a massive waste of time.

I broke the outstanding work into smaller chunks, and fitted a few items in here and there over past few weeks. I also removed some items from the scope of the project because I wanted to move on, and I otherwise would be working on it for ever and ever.

Slashed Scope

All items in the above list were completed except for the below, which were removed from scope, which is a sneaky project-management trick for meeting deadlines.

• Think of some more levels
• Make a level select menu
  
• Search for a rewind time sound effect
  
• VHS rewind effect for rewind ability

The first item was slashed because of my lack of enthusiasm for the project right now. Thinking of more levels would require more features, which would in turn require more development, and I just wasn't interested in that for this project. I decided to not do this, and focus on getting the project into with only a handful of levels.

The second item was slashed for a similar reason, but it was mainly the additional complexity rather than my enthusiasm for the idea. I really did want to make a level select, and I believe this was one of my key goals at the start of the project, but it would have just added a few more weeks onto the project, and I just wasn't prepared to do that. Since the game could be in a completed state without it, this feature got axed. Maybe I will pick it up in a standalone, proof-of-concept style project, which is something I did for the scene transition system used in this game before I used it in this game.

I did try to find sound and visual effects, however I was unable to. I did find an on-screen effect, but this involved using shaders and delving into stuff I didn't really understand. In my experience, one is never able to just task something like that onto a project with ease - one has to actually commit time to learning about it - so I decided to just chuck this in the bin

Outstanding To Do

• Write a release dev log
• Update the project page
• Make a logo/background artwork for the project page
• Write a post-mortem dev log