I can’t believe I’m writing a postmortem for my senior project already. It’s been quite the ride from start to finish, but I think we came out the other side alright. There was something refreshing about working on a game for so long, being able to dedicate time and effort to something bigger than any previous project. On the flipside though, it was utterly exhausting. It felt like trying to be a well run game studio while also having an entire other job. Part of me wishes we went smaller. But I’m so happy with what we built as a team. We made a story game! We have conversations and cool interactions and most people got to work on what they wanted to.
Would I want to do this all over again? I’m not sure. I think I’d want to focus on perfecting a few tiny projects to give my portfolio a specialized edge. I got to write a full video game script, but I’m sure it’s not in the right format for a professional showing. I also worked on a lot of the models in the game and boy do I have to thank Cris for being patient with my forgetfulness. If anything, this project has given me a solid understanding of what it’s like to work with a team for longer than 5 weeks. It was a lot of planning and changing, something I think we all did really well. We were good about recognizing scope and adjusting our goals when necessary.
In the future, if I was acting as lead on something I’d prefer that was my only job. Same with writer or modeler. I was much more a flex player on our team and helped where I could. I still feel like a generalist, which isn’t bad, but this hasn’t given me more experience in being a specialized worker.
In the end, I don’t hate the project and I don’t hate the team. I enjoyed our meetings, our memes, and our group therapy. Love you guys.
I will leave the gifs below as my final parting word.