https://store.steampowered.com/app/2861610/The_Krilling_Scare_Feast/​

The Krilling is a sandbox game based around being a ghost shrimp and getting into trouble. In it, you possess various object around a bayou themed hotel and invoke emotions onto the guests to create a spooky recipe to return to your human self. This game was created as a part of the game development/design program at Indiana University. I was one of the programmers on the project, and this is my post mortem. I will go over things that went well, things that could have gone better, and at the end I will try to summarize and perhaps leave you with something you can apply to your own experience in games.

What Went Well:

1. Movement based fun - A lot of our possessable objects are based around certain real world objects. For each of them we needed to decide how the player would interact with the world around them. This became a fun game of inventing new ways for plays to traverse the world all while impacting the hotel guests around them. This really became the bread and butter of the game, however it did take awhile for us to get there (more on that later).
2. Environment - I was a programmer, so I can't speak as well to the art in the game, but the environment art is something we always got many compliments on and throughout all of our playtests remained a consistent high light.
3. Character - Our game had a lot going for it with its theme and the main character being a ghost shrimp. If we had had more time I am sure this would have been fleshed out even more so, but even so play testers often commented on how cute or fun it was that the main character was a shrimp just trying to turn back into a human.

What Could Have Gone Better:

1. Overall design - We landed in a pretty solid place, but to be honest we had very little time to work within the design we landed on because of how long it took to get here. Now, we didn't have a designer, so that would certainly answer any question of how we got into that situation. Regardless, the lack of a designer put a lot of stress on other people who now had to make up for a job they didn't know how to do. We got there eventually but it took much longer.
2. Game Length - The game is quite short in the grand scheme of things. At one point we wanted to have multiple iterations of similar yet different scenarios that would play out on the map to allow the player to mess with new toys and mess things up in different ways. Ultimately we had to scope down, and a lot of disorganization led us to ending up with only a fraction of what we wanted.
3. Polish - There are a lot of aspects of the game that just feel very static. The idea was that once we were all done with our individual tasks that we would all pitch in and help get some smaller details in that would have greatly polished the game. However, individual tasks took much longer than expected so a lot of polish material got lost.

Learning:

This project taught me a lot about what it is like to work in a group. It most importantly taught me how important communication is, especially with short, mid, and long term goals and how important it is to have an overarching design/vision for a project. There were a lot of instances were work could have been done better/not need to be tweaked if we had been able to see a little farther ahead in the future. Ultimately though, most if not all of the struggles of this project stemmed from the lack of a designer/design to work off of. So, if I can leave you with one piece of advice from my experience here, it is to always have a solid idea of what you are trying to make and make sure that is what you are going to go with. Design pivots are hard and developing ideas that don't exist is, well, impossible. This project was quite fun to make though and I really enjoyed working through a lot of these bumps with my group members.