Tungsten

Post-Mortem Analysis

What Went Right?

• We maintained energy and passion for the project throughout the entirety of development. My co-developer and I chose a subject we were both quite passionate about for this game, which allowed our love for the game to persist for all of the game’s development and after.

• The game’s content was pulled from the real experiences of transgender individuals for this game. Not only was I able to pull from my own experiences, thoughts, and feelings as a non-binary person, but so was my co-developer. I also reached out to numerous other transgender individuals of various identities, to ensure we were able to convey our intended message in a way that connects with as many trans people as possible while still being understandable to cisgender people as well.

• All design and narrative aspects of the game were an intensely collaborative effort. My co-developer and I would regularly spend hours at a time planning out, working on, and refining every aspect of Puck’s story and the game’s appearance, dedicating all we could to making something impactful.

What Went Wrong?

• We failed to consider how resource-intensive branching narratives tend to be. Due to how much time planning, writing, editing, implementing, and testing every line of dialogue for every choice ended up being, an entire planned scene had to be cut to allow us to focus on what we already had.

• Task management was only partially handled on HackNPlan—we ended up communicating task progress and new tasks by verbal communication just as often as we used the game’s HackNPlan board. While it always felt easier in the moment to talk about tasks rather than document them, this made actually tracking work quite the hassle.

• We were, at times, too attached to our game to accept feedback. Pulling from our own experiences, as well as those of other people within the LGBTQ+ community, meant that we were sometimes stubborn about decisions made and unwilling to act on objective, professional criticisms.

What Would I Have Done Differently?

• I would’ve opened a discussion with my co-developer about whether or not we wanted to have more helmet/color options to influence dialogue, or an additional scene like we had planned. Once we realized how much writing we’d have with 6 colors and 4 interactive scenes, we failed to address the fact that it may be too much for us with our other responsibilities and limited time, leading to us having to abruptly cut our planned 4th scene to polish our 3 others.

• To mitigate the problem with using task management and recording work/tasks, I would have suggested we have one of us quickly jot down a summary of our discussions either as we spoke or after. Even if the notes would’ve been simple, they could’ve assisted us in translating what we spoke about more easily to our tasks on HackNPlan; Additionally, I’ve found since working on this game that even the most simple notes could help jog memory, which could’ve been helpful for remembering tasks and work done regardless of the HackNPlan.

• I would have made sure to consider our chosen development medium just as much as I (and we) considered the game’s intended message in the development process and in receiving feedback. I feel like one way in which we could’ve overcome our hesitancy to accept feedback due to the personal nature of the subject would be to consider more the objective fact that we were making a game. The purpose was not just to tell a selected story, but to tell said story in an engaging, interactive way players would enjoy–taking more time to recognize this could’ve allowed us to step back from our attachment and examine our game feedback in a more objective light.