Week 18, Year 2: Oasis Post-Mortem.

We did it! The project is handed in and completed. First things first, check out the playthrough.

Pretty cool right? We're all immensely proud of it. 4 weeks is a short amount of time and it flew by, I can't believe we're already a month in to 2015. But in 4 weeks, we all feel as though we achieved a whole lot.

We stretched our texture budget to the limit to make this level. We were really keen to hit the cosy atmosphere in our concepts and we knew right from the start that we'd have to make a fair bit of stuff. There are 3 key things, I feel our team did particularly well:

• We didn't scope too large. I'd not heard of this term until a week ago, but something we did almost intuitively, right from the start, was reduce our idea to a minimal viable product. Or at least the 'minimal hand-in-able product'. Then we added stretch goals as the project progressed.
• We didn't waste time and stuck to our schedule. I make a lot of schedules, but rarely do I stick to them, because they're either unrealistic or I take deadlines too lightly. But not this time.
• We communicated well. Through-out the project, communication between team members was excellent. Most importantly, during the crucial early stages, we were all working together on site to arrive at a unified project idea.

No project is perfect however, and this project was no exception. Fortunately, as we initially scoped small, this is mostly a list of things we would have liked to have added, rather than a list of things we wish we hadn't done. And hopefully we will have time to go back and add those things in the future.

Of course, there is also the list of things that remain a bit broken; such as the arbitrarily teleporting doors and the landscape shading issues.

And don't even get me started on light maps.

I'm nit-picking though, overall this project was a great experience. Every member of the team was a pleasure to work with, and I'm full of optimism moving forward. 

This was a fantastic project and I took a lot from it. The task was exciting and an excellent exercise to prepare us for the monster project that's up next...but more on that next week.