Postmortem Report on Fuzzy Farmer

Problems.

The primary problem we faced with this project was time related setbacks. We had a death in the family proceeded directly by the flu. These issues caused me to play a lot of catch up, which in turn hindered our ability to expand upon our initial idea as much as we’d have liked.

We also had issues with understanding when to use event tick and when to use a timer. Thanks to the support of our professor, we have a better understanding now.

What Went Well.

We could have put this in the Problems category, but we feel that overcoming our lack of knowledge in Blueprints was a huge success during this course. It was a massive obstacle at first, but we quickly began to understand it, and now it’s a very powerful tool that we have at our disposal. We also, through guidance from tutorials and course materials, have gained a very solid understanding of how to build some wonderful game features. We feel strongly that this project will be an excellent steppingstone into our own personal projects in the future.

Lessons.

This entire project was one big lesson. We learned so many new concepts regarding Blueprints and game design documentation and techniques.

One of the key lessons we learned was to be realistic was to be honest with ourselves regarding capabilities. This played an important role when we started to get behind due to extenuating circumstances. Understanding the limitations on our time and what is necessary for the project itself to succeed allowed me to curb self-deprecation and maintain motivation throughout the duration of the project.

Task Log – Refactored.

We had to reevaluate the scope of our project (these could also be placed under the problems category):

1. We decided against trying to implement C++ into the project. We decided with the time constraint and the overall scale of the project, that C++ was an unnecessary addition to the project. If the project continues in development, we will look into moving some of the Blueprint structures to a more efficient C++ class.
2. We did not implement AI or randomness to our fuzzies. This was a major disappointment to me as we had hoped to develop this project into a more enjoyable experience, but with our aforementioned circumstances, we had to cut out a lot of extra work for the sake of original scope and time restrictions.

Task Log – Balanced Approach.

Thanks to the structure of this course, this was not a very difficult task to undergo. We made sure that we gave only the weeks amount of time that we were talking about the game structure to implement those into our game. We revisited ideas towards the end for cleanup purposes, but for the most part things were designed systematically throughout the duration of the course in correspondence with module objectives.

Conclusion

Note: A lot of these categories play off one another and the overall experience of this project was positive. We enjoyed the amount we learned from developing this project. We hope to take all these newly learned concepts and apply them to our game design idea that we’ve been playing around with mentally for months. We’d like to thank our professor for his support and also hope to develop more exciting games in the future.

For images and other past projects see Past Projects.