PROJECT SCOPE - HOW IT CHANGED



If we have to compare our initial project scope with the final one, there's a lot that changed, or got discarded, and added.

Honestly,  in some aspects, it could seem like a completely different game from what I thought at first we could achieve.  On the other hand, the core mechanics are there as the art style and concept.
So what changed along the way and why?
Well, many things can affect the scope of a game, and in our case what impacted the scope the most was time and resources.
The initial project idea was to have 3 or 4 playable polished levels that Reebo could travel through those after completing them. 
Each level would have a different unique mechanic, different enemies, and different themes/scenarios.
Of course, after a few weeks in during the previous trimester, we realized the amount of work needed to achieve something like that, even using a low poly style and simple mechanics. The amount of time required was huge, plus we didn't consider all the obstacles we would've encountered along the journey.  And of course, it happened. Multiple times. Many times. But well, this is the learning process, right?!

When we finished the last trimester we had something decent, one level and the hub world. Wasn't really polished and the character movement was a bit weird, too floaty when jumping, and not really nice to control in general, but at least 90% of the mechanics were working.
Then when we moved into this trimester we had a chat with the lecturers of our class and we concluded that was probably best to change the scope to polish this level we had and add another one. But do this only after fixing the character movement, because is the most important thing in platformer games.
That's what we did and it came with its costs, time and time again. So it wasn't before week 4 that we actually started working on the rest and we started adding things, polishing mechanics, adding new props, rework on the character model and many other things. 

Around week 6/7 we were facing many problems with some mechanics like the buttons and crates, or the texturing and UV, also we had issues swapping the old skeleton with the new one for Reebo, and few more little issues. All these began stacking up and we realized that fixing all would have gone to cost a big chuck of our time available that was reserved to create another level.
Here is when we had another meeting with the lectures and decided to narrow down the scope and go for just one level but very polished.

This was going to work perfectly for us too, since if you would like to sell your game to some company what you need is a vertical slice of your game, and developing one polished level would be enough to also build a trailer to sell the game. 

The scope changed how we looked at our sprints too and started working harder to polish and improve what we had first. Around week 10 we saw we were at a good point and we knew the game was missing some mechanics and features, thus is here that we started implementing new things that I believe definitely improved the final experience. 

Looking back we can't believe how far we got, and still how far we can go. In the future months we would probably keep working on the project even if we are done with our course and maybe one day try to sell it on steam. Maybe next year. Who knows...



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