It’s been a crazy trip but we finally got through the development lifecycle of Lithic! It turned out to be a great experience for us grad students and raised the bar for our future work. We’ve accrued much deeper knowledge in realistic production cycles, technical design, look development, player satisfaction testing, and gameplay streamlining; and, since we’ve gathered this knowledge, there are also mistakes we made along the way that we can share with our readers.
The Right Stuff
- Our scheduling was on-target. We create a set of goals we intended to deliver, and over the course of 11 weeks delivered on them.
- From the onset, we had a vision of discovery and an aesthetic to match that vision. We managed to stick to it, adding only when players needed more information.
- We had strong communication within teams; both the technical and art leads created concept designs that the programmers and artists respectively could follow, question, and implement effectively.
The Wrong Stuff
- Communication across teams was difficult. We lacked the skills in appointing members to submit content to the blogs, to reach out to potential playtesters, and to keep the group informed of its members’ progress.
- Not enough attention was given to informing users of their progress and available actions. The master inventory wall, for instance, was implemented in the last two weeks of development and could have used more time to be playtested.
- We decided to experiment with a different way of animating images across the cave walls: instead of using materials that travel on the wall’s UV, we used a complex light system that had many setbacks (textures can be reversed, their color palette per-light can’t have any range, and they can only take up a certain portion of the image canvas or else they stretch). In future developments, this system -- while an interesting way to solve the problem of making images flush against a surface -- would need to be complemented by more standard methods of texturing.
