1. Lack of communications and vision.

The main issue that I had when developing for The Last Defender (TLD) is that we do not have a clear vision of what we want to achieve. Most of the time, we do not know what we want and we merely implement the stuff based on what we feel is needed for the game. This in turn made the game went in all sorts of directions.

2. Poor engine architecture.

A lot of our development time were spent on fixing bugs. I believed that were having memory bugs because it would caused random crash from time to time. I think that this late into the development, we should be spending more time churning out newer contents and rather than that, most of our time were spent fixing engine bugs which caused our gameplay logic to be very fragile. It crashed really easily and sometimes we had no idea where was causing to crash.

One such area where we believed were having issues were the tween system. The tween system initially keeps reference to objects, meaning that when the items dies, it will still be holding the reference to these items and potentially modiyfing memory. The fix was to recreate the tween front end to take in handles instead of the reference to the objects. These took a little while to get used to and eventually, all of the system was using it. This fixed some of our issues that we were having.

3. Losing motivations.

Several times during the span of the project, I was not really motivated to continue the project. I would rather focus on my other assignments than work on the game. Reason because that I feel that this was not a game that I would enjoy playing much. This made me realized that it is tough to work as a game developer if I cannot enjoy the game. I think I still want to make games, but perhaps not for a big studio, I want to make something that I enjoy making.

Apart from me, I can tell some of my team mates have like really low morale when it comes to the game. We have weekly meetings and standups but I feel that rather than serving its purpose of informing what others are doing, I feel that it is more of a chore. I think it might be because of the way it is organized. I think team meetings is where team mates come together and show each other what they have done. Rather than talking about it, it's better to show others what you have been working on.

That being said, I am going to try my hands on being an app developer for a while. Did I mention, I currently found an internship position at an NUS lab/startup. They are making apps that will benefit people and I want to try my hands on working on apps rather than games for a little while.

1. Able to make assets even without artists.

Most important thing in games is always about creating assets. Unfortunately for us, our artists left during the start of the semester and therefore we had to rely on our own to create our own 2D/3D art assets. Additionally, we also had an additional external member help with the sound design.

2. Juicy particles and feedbacks.

Our particle system is quite powerful, thanks to our graphics engineer. Thanks to the tool, our gameplay programmer was able to add lots of feedbacks and particles to the game. To the point where it's too much. I think that is good in any game. Feedback and adding juice to the gameplay is equally important to the gameplay experience. And here I would like to thank our gameplay programmers for making the game so juicy.