Levi's Postmortem

For this game, my main role was the narrative designer. Additionally, all of us acted as game designers since we only had 3 members. I came up with the initial idea for the game, that being a cozy game where you grow various flowers. My team and I decided to have this game take place over the course of a week with the main character growing three different flowers. We also decided there would be some “secret lore” in the game in order to make it a bit more interesting. This took the form of a book the player would read in order to get instructions on how to play the game and information about the flowers the player was growing. On the Kanban board we created, I had 8 small to medium tasks assigned to me. These tasks primarily centered around writing the book. I needed about 3-4 hours of work each week to complete outside of class. I ended up with about 2-3 hours of work each week to complete outside of class, with the amount of work being the highest the first week. In this time, most of my work was contained to this Google Docs page with the writing and some of the planning. 

I wanted this game to create a classic cozy game experience where there’s no real threat to the player. However, I recognized that there needed to be some world building in order to make the experience interesting to players, hence the darker secrets about the flowers and Harvester in general. I wanted everything to feel cute and cozy, but like it’s hiding something. 

The most difficult part of this project was honestly just that it was a group project. While I enjoyed spitting up roles since that meant everyone was doing things they are good at and enjoy, it can be really difficult to trust other people in group projects. I had never worked on a game in a group and they did a really wonderful job. However, I was still extremely anxious about everything getting done in time. This was heightened when I had issues with GitHub and was unable to access the game on my computer. This meant I couldn’t capture screenshots or footage for the Itch.io page, something that had been tasked to me. 

Something I learned while working on the project was that planning is extremely important. As boring as it can be, designating tasks and checking in is vital to making a group game work. Overall, I’m very proud of how the game turned out. I definitely would’ve changed some things if I were to do it again, but I’m still really proud of what we made and happy with my writing. I think the book turned out really cool and it was overall very satisfying to see the game go from a little sketch and a few notes to a space you can walk around and interact with in such a short amount of time.