Beelonging: A Postmortem

This post has been updated 21/05/2018

So we just finished our first Game called “Beelonging” (If you want, you can play it here). 10 Weeks ago

we picked a concept for a shoot em up game about a bee swarm saving its hive from the evil bear, fighting
various insect enemies and now we are finally done making this vision come true and additionally changing
a few design decisions and releasing our game.

Beelonging now consist of five different levels with various enemies, a power up, the ability to pick up
other bees to join your swarm,  a boss fight and even unlockable costumes to choose from.

While creating the game there a lot of things that went really well. We were only confronted with a few
obstacles but otherwise had a smooth experience designing our Game.

One of the main reasons for that is our team spirit. After choosing our concept, we were all really passionate
about the product and had about the same vision in mind of how the end product is going to look like.
Being passionate about the game also led to the artists and coders to take that extra mile and take over
some more work to make the game as perfect as we can. This did not even feel like work but a fun activity
where we could let out our creativity and create something we will eventually be proud of.

Furthermore communication worked out really well. We had daily meetings in which we told other group
members about our current progress and we got the chance to discuss issues or questions that came up
during development. In addition to that, we often met up to work together and have fika and even if we
were not working at the same place, we easily exchanged information and opinions on Slack.

On the other hand there are a few things that could have been improved during development. One of them
is music. Although we recorded and edited all of our sounds ourselves, we kind of neglected thinking
about our music and ended up putting the exact same song into every single level. As this song was really
repetitive, players would even take off their headphones after some time and start playing without any
music or sounds because they became annoyed, This is not good. Even worse, the music we implemented
for our boss battle and main menu did not really fit in with the main theme at all and the whole music
selection just felt a bit off.

Another thing we could have focused on a bit more is the level design itself. As we eventually realised,
having nice mechanics in your game is not everything, especially if you do not put them together in an
interesting and challenging way. Even though Beelonging has five different levels, they each just feel
very generic and almost randomly generated. There are no interesting combinations of challenges and
mechanics, no real difficulty curve and new enemies get just thrown into the game instead of teaching
the player through level design, what certain enemies or mechanics do. This is mainly because we just
started setting up levels a few days before the release and I feel like we could have had a few less (but
better designed) levels in the game, which would have improved its overall quality and fun level
immensely.

A similar thing applies to the boss battle. We had a boss implemented in our game quite early on, but only
one mechanic of the game attacking you. When you look at other boss battles in popular games, you will
realise that there are different phases in a boss game, interactability with your environment and an
interesting variety of random (but kind of predictable) attacks by the boss. Unfortunately our game
has none of these. After making your way through the five different levels, the player is expecting
something truly epic, a climax to the whole experience, but instead gets a rather disappointing boss
fight solely about dodging the bosses arms attacking from various directions. Having a more complex
and interactive boss fight would have created a nice framework for the game, but also functioned as a
climax for the difficulty curve leaving the player with pride after defeating it.

I realized that there is more to making a game than just the development process. While a main part of
creating a game is coding, making decisions about mechanics and creating art for the game, we should
not have neglected the field of music, level design and player feedback as much as we did. It is important
to spend some time on getting player feedback, seeing how a game is perceived and then polishing it
according to that. I learnt that even when you feel like your game is good, rather focus on polishing up
what you have and add game feel and player feedback instead of just adding more features, like for
example a selection of different costumes. It should have been more about polishing the core gameplay
instead of just adding features to make up for what did not turn out as well as expected.

Besides those points I am extremely happy about the outcome of our game. We achieved to create a
visually and mechanically appealing game and we could definitely tell that our friends and playtesters
had a lot of fun playing it. As this was our first game, we learned so much about Unity, Photoshop,
creating sprite sheets and recording and editing sounds. As for the next project I will work in another
group, but I definitely enjoyed the productive atmosphere and working together with my talented team
members during the creation of Beelonging.

Play our game: