Deadline

The final day to get our game finished, we had extra features programmed in separate flash files and we thought it would have been as easy as a copy and paste task but sadly that proved to be wrong as new problems came about and because it was so time consuming to copy and paste codes from a separate file to many objects in the final version of the game, it was close to deadline that we found these problems so we had to revert back to what we already had.

 

This left us with not implement a nice visual starting screen and game over screen with a high score because we kept pushing this task to end as we thought we could do it in a matter of 10 minutes so we just tried to implement the new features which we shouldn't have done since we have experienced many problems when adding new elements to the game so we should have known that it couldn't be done in 1 day. Instead we should have tried to refine what we already have since we still have the core mechanics of the game. The elements we could have refined was the train moving along the tracks properly so it looks visually better, changing the visual lights of packages to have the last circle large, showing you have reached the limit, made a starting screen with an option for players to read instructions,  change the arrows to leavers to players don't get confused with where the arrows is pointing as it doesn't indicate which way the train will be going unless you click on the arrows which gives a visual cue on the screen which way the train will go. 

 

Finally the upgrade train feature was not implemented because just getting the trains around the course was a lot of trouble to get working and to do the same job with a new train would be overwhelming as there are many codes in the game exactly the same except the name of objects so when a problem occurs, it will be hard to pinpoint the problem. This was also an extra feature to visually please the player and increase the challenge so we put this feature at the back of the list to do which kept getting pushed back like the title screen, game over and high score as we tried to solve problems we had before.

 

Although we worked well as a team, the problem we had was not having a team leader which would make the crucial decisions whether we should implement the features we tried to do on the last day as we were blinded by trying to add as much features from our design document into our game instead of refining our game which doesn't feel like a polished game. The last day should have only been adding graphics to our game or replacing graphics we already had.