Mouse Flight Project Post-Mortem + Lessons Learned

OK so 2nd post of the morning!

As its pretty certain that work will not continue on the project its clear that I've learned a few things.

FYI: I've not done work on it in over a year (maybe two?).

Lesson 1.
Learning to code, and Unity's API is important to creating games with it (if you are specializing in game code); but this does not mean that you ignore proper design workflows!

This means analyzing functional/nonfunctional engineering requirements, putting together UML designs, and flowcharts. You should be doing these things at the very least to get a good idea of what how you'd like the code to achieve what it needs to.

Haste makes waste, and failing to plan and design is planning to fail!

Lesson 2. When putting together a game you can use primitives to get systems emplaced. However make it known that it is WIP to demo viewers, and at the very least give it some look and feel to make it a game.

Lesson 3. Set deadlines, goals, and organize your project!

This was one of the biggest problems for myself. Personal stuff aside, deadlines goals and organization was something of neglect to me. I actually told people that I cared not for organization.


Hope this helps, though much of it may be obvious.

 

No replies...?

._______.

 

Your first post is vague and has no screenshots or anything. We still have very little information about the project you produced. This is written like a blog post that had a previous post that explained the experience in detail.

I would be interested in reading more about your experience.

 

The Last update:

A bit earlier:

The very first video:

Apologies for that @spryx I assumed most had heard of it but it seems the Unity crowd has changed lots...

 

This only looks like a prototype though. Are you done with it?

You should challenge yourself more. You've got the bones of a game here, apply lessons learned on the next step of polishing it into something more complete.

Instead of "post-mortem", this could be "phase 1 reassessment."

 

I have to agree with @BIGTIMEMASTER here. You have some really solid mechanics going on and a good idea. It may just be a little bit too soon for a post-mortem. This still looks as though it might be in the design stage. Admittedly, I have many projects on my own that get to this point. It is natural to feel some burnout after you have worked on a project this long. You now are getting a solid picture about the amount of work it will take to finish everything. I would encourage you to take a second look at the project when you feel a bit refreshed.

 

<3 you guys thank you!!

 

yeah you gonna find that you come to a point where you cannot continue forward for whatever emotional reasons. but you have to imagine, everybody else comes to that point too. Most will quit, start something new. Never get anywhere. Then quit big time.

If you have the good habit of finishing what you start just on principle, you gonna rise above 90%. Everything you are doing you have to view as self-development. This way you are constantly investing in yourself. Never wasted time.

So even if your only goal for the project is "extend the limits of my patience," or "get over the fear of publishing ugly artwork", that is a very worthy goal that will serve you well in teh long run.

 

That said, don't feel afraid of moving on from this particular project. Completing stuff is important, but if the best way for you to finish something is to start a new, smaller project or one that better suits your skills... do it.

But also, finish it.

 

To quote a certain AI Construct:

"I've already begun..."

 

I'll play devils advocate here, I don't think you should finish this unless you have a solid plan for what the rest of the game is.

I don't mean to be harsh, but this isn't a deep enough commitment at this point to even begin talking about seeing this through.You know this by looking at your versioning 0.1.3 -- you know this is barely a tenth of the work (it's actually less if you're looking for a really complete gaming experience).

How deeply you invest in a project should really depend on you, what your goals are, and what stage you believe yourself to be in your development.

If this prototype required significant amounts of time on your part to complete, then most likely you need to scale back, reassess and refocus on strengthening your grasp on the basics.

So, if that took a month to produce, I'd say you're probably looking at 3+ years to complete this to a polished state. The work load outstanding is tremendous, and the difficulty curve goes up.

I know this runs counter to most of the advice you get on these boards, but it really comes down to the following:

• Sit down and ask yourself what your goals are.
• Look at how long it realistically takes you to make progress.
• Figure out how much time you are willing to commit.
• Then reassess your goals, are they realistic?

If your goal is just to mess around and have fun building stuff for the sake of it, then don't be afraid to embrace that, and use that freedom to scrap whatever project you want, whenever you want.

If your goal is to make a game that doesn't suck, be honest with yourself about the chances of that (very low) and the time required (years).

If your goal is to be a professional, don't look at the one in a million chance that you hit big, look at tiny, incremental works that build your skill set and knowledge base, require minimal time and can start to bring in income.

 

To give some perspective, this was my first video

Actually this one was before that

Its no the point though, now we are here (more or less, its an old clip but shows level of polish) and we are no near at final version. Point is your idea of post mortem is far from what a real post mortem are, imo

 

I mean post-mortem means after death, right? This thread's purpose is just to illustrate that I have stopped working on it and what I've learned from the project. You're arguing semantics. Why do I find myself having to defend my position over trivial things?

 

Yes, the adverb does. The noun on the other hand means poking at a dead body to see what caused death.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation
It appears you have have been working on it for 4 years. Definitely time to give it up as a project that you intend to ship. Though not entirely tossing it if you intend to make something similar and want to use it as a testbed. I have a project that I have been working on for years that will never launch, but I use it all the time to create new tools, explore ideas and concepts and test unity features. It is a fully working game, so able to use if for solid testing.

But also the point of a postmortem is document what lessons you learned in process so future endeavors you can build upon. In your OP, your "lessons", are all 100% common sense knowledge. If it took 4 years to "learn" that you can use temp assets, that you need to learn coding and that you need to set goals... well you should probably take a look at your learning process. Millions of people have built games, or done related projects. Thousands have documented them. Read a book on game development, take the advice in it as "already learned" and apply it. 4 years is enough to learn how to code, not just learn you need to learn. Build on the work and knowledge and experience of others.

 

True, I guess for me it's just more interesting to discuss post mortem for a product that went a tad longer in development. Otherwise we could do it for any POC we do

 

Holy S***, disregard my advice. I figured you'd been working on this a few months.

You can learn much faster by doing less stuff yourself from scratch and instead trying to learn from all the resources people are puttinig out there. That way catching up to what others know already instead of reinventing wheels.

 

What would be wrong with that?

The point of a POC is specifically to explore a concept. There's little point doing that if you don't follow it up with some kind of evaluation or review.

 

Thats more a classic retrospective

 

It's good advice though!

A lot of people say that you shouldn't spend too much time just watching tutorials or w/e, and it's sound advice. But I think the nuance is that you need to spend ALL of your time watching tutorials and learning every single thing you can from others, BUT you need to practice each new thing you learn thoroughly. Not just follow the step by step but actually test what you learned with your own application.This way you run into those issues that force you to develop your own problem solving skills, but at the smae time you ain't lost in the woods, starving, not realizing civilization is half a mile to your east.

This way you don't waste a second slowly learning something that has already been learned by somebody else. They can teach you faster. And you pick up lots of different ways of thinking and solving problems than if you just grind on your own.

Anytime I have to do something new, the first thing I do is scour the web to see if somebody else has done it already. For the experimental phase of my next game, I have spent two weeks just going through all kinds of third party tools, and combing the web to find different artist's styles. The goal is to find the best solutions for me that already exist as much as possible. Because I wil never finish if i try to do everything on my own!

To give more example, I'm using trees from two different asset packs. I dissect them, using bits and pieces to form my own trees. My dog model is modified from the wolf model in Call of Duty. The rig is based from that as well. I didn't need as complex, but it still gave me a good start. The animations I watched some frame-by-frame animations from the guy who animated Game of Throne dragons and just copied what he did. Mines obviously nowhere near as good, but it's a helluva lot better htan if I just winged it on my own.

For shaders, I ain't got time to learn to write shaders. That's not my specialty. So I gather a bunch of different shader packages, try to figure out which parts I need from which, and then I got good idea how to start my own. I tried that and still found it too time consuming, so the next step was to write to a guy who teaches shader writing and I pay him for a couple hours time to run me through some basics. Just enough that I can modify what I already got.

Literally nothing I start from scratch. First step is always to leverage the fact that we is hoomans and can benefit from generational knowledge.

One other important point: Don't compare yourself to yourself. Don't compare yourselfl to your peers. Compare your work to the best work in the medium. The goal isn't to match it, obviously, but that is the standard by which you judge yourself. Obviously your mindset cannot be, "I have to be the best!", but rather, "how much percentage of the best can I reach in the timeframe I have?"

Anyway, it's good that you shared lessons learned and I'll look forward to seeing how you apply them to your next work.

 

Cool prototype! However if I were you I'd start tightening up that workflow/productivity and crank out a lot more of these.

 

@BIGTIMEMASTER All of what I've iterated upon here boils down to two factors: 1. lack of funds and 2. lack of planning.

I'd love to work with someone on a project... I started that in the spring on a new project but I had school to focus on. He left because I think he got bored with the progress we were making...

That's not to say I am slow at creating things. A document detailing plans (something I'd been notoriously avoiding) gives me things to shoot for. SOOOO when I began developing the project I was modifying transforms and doing a ton of math without real any advanced math knowledge... at one point I realized that to keep this going I had to implement collision single handedly. That's when things began to coalesce. It appeared that I did not know as much as I thought (this was some time ago) about programming and software development... I was not using sofware engineering methods. I was not using OOP SOLID concepts. I didn't know what a rigidbody was.
.
So when I put together a UML doc showing what I had to do, it took me two weeks, yes two weeks to reach the feature set I had previously worked on for two years... that is when I began to really grasp game development and software development. I put together a third person shooter demo for a team in that same quantity of time last year...

That particular project team learned a bunch from me. Don't knock my expertise. The number of god awful problems that the team had introduced to their project was astounding. There opponents sliding around in the air shooting at you, to give you an example of what I mean (gravity was a ludicrous transform manipulation).

FYI I am in a Differential Equations class right now. Its the easiest class I've ever had in college. I learn well enough. The past is behind me, the only thing I think about with it is what I've learned. My first two years of Uni and part of the third year were a cluster-frick due to a sweet little package of stress, awful time management and clinical depression. I'm standing on good foundation, though my grades don't reflect that (cumulatives are hard to change late in the game).

FYI: that online notion of "you gotta do side projects in CS University to be successful" is tripe. I am partly where I am now in GPA and life due to that BS advice.

 

Suddenly curious what the end goal of the project was going to be. I don't remember you mentioning it but then I tend to forget things that aren't brought up occasionally.

 

I think this is the key take away.

Just keep in mind your username. 10,000 hours is generally the rule of thumb for developing deep skill in a subject. If you work 8 hour days, full time, that's somewhere in the ballpark of 4-5 years.

You're a student, you're still in the process of learning tons of other skills and you have limited time to focus on strict game dev stuff. It's gonna take you quite a while to hit that 10,000 hour mark.

Some have advocated lots of learning shortcuts, that kind of stuff is fine if you're just trying to cobble something together asap - but if you're really looking to build mastery in the subject I'd caution against it. Learn deep and correct. You'll be able to be productive at under 10k hours, sounds like you've already reached a point where you're many multiples faster than you were.

I'm looking forward to seeing your next project. Hope you share some of it.

 

The 10k thing is pretty much bunk. The guy who is responsible for the term was really just saying that mastering a skill takes a lot time and effort, not just ability. It absolutely isn't a path to success, and in no way a guarantee to mastering a skill. It's just a shorthand way of saying work hard. If you want to be good at something, you have to focus, be prepared to invest a lot of time, and most importantly, you have to have develop a subjective and critical eye about your work. If you can't see what you are doing subjectively poorly, you can never improve, regardless of hours spent.

It doesn't get much clearer than this. ^

 

I think it's pretty spot on. Most ppl I know who have done around 5 years full time are generally pretty good. I would almost estimate it at double that for real expertise though, at least in a deep field like software.

 

We ain't saying you a big dummy. And even if we were, who cares? Get revenge.

The thing is, no doubt you learned a lot and certainly you can do a lot more programming than me so it's not like I'm talking S*** on you. But after four years of effort, you produced what only looks like a rough prototype. The bad thing is that you didn't realize that on your own. That it only looked like a prototype.

With art, you can't just see it from your own eyes. I mean you can but then it's just for you right. Nobody else gonna value it. You have to see it from your audience's eyes. So if people are looking at it and are like, "wut dis? Is finished?" That's just feedback you use to get inside the brains of your audience. Just data. Use it, or not. You the captain.

 

I'm not a big fan of this thread. Feels like one of the harshest I've ever seen, and I think OP is making the right calls and doesn't deserve a pile on.

OP never said it was a complete project. I think this thread was a way for him to add a little closure to something he worked on. Let it be.

@TenKHoursDev - don't let this thread bring you down. You learned, made the correct call in putting that project to bed, and can move forward. Good luck, dude!

 

Playing pretend and coddling might be a friendly thing to do but it's just another way to say "eff you I don't care about you."

I am sure our friend can handle some mildly tough critique from the internet and, wearing their big boy pants, either make use of it or discard it as they see fit.

I mean honestly if somebody isn't willing to jump in and say, "uh dude, you are way in left field" then what is even the point? I'd hope somebody would point out to me if they thought I was doing things wrong.

 

Honestly I just wanted to achieve my life's dream. Make a game... it was never a goal to make a ton of dough. Goals were nebulous. Since it was definitely not my 'plan' to sell it, thus I did not want to risk actual $$$.

@frosted I appreciate the kind words and encouragement.

@BIGTIMEMASTER I mean most days I can handle some criticism but some days that is not in the cards. Believe me I understand the difference between what I made and many other projects, though there was a time when it fell off my radar. Also the comment about coddling... yeesh.

"Attack the idea not the person", some of ya.

 

So do you begin to plan and design? What plan and design do you want to have?

 

@hongwaixuexi
The way I see it these days is if 1. you want to create a game then step 2. is to decide on a concept. I have always been a functional more than a creative designer. I focus on features, code, and how things will fit together rather than art and wanted things. Step 3. is to brainstorm and step 4. prune ideas that won't work.

Making game isn't all about wanting some things to exist within it. Its also about logical analysis and making design decisions.

But don't listen to me, all I know how to do is create a stupid 'prototype'.

 

Nobody is attacking any person here. It's straight constructive crit by people who want to see you excel and improve.

By taking defensive stance, you shut mind off to using any of it smartly. Even if people were straight up hating on you, there still could be valuable feedback in there that you can use.

There is no benefit to taking things personal and having emotional response.

Lets say I came on here and was like, "yo your game is trash it looks like a ten year old made it I can't even tell which direction the thing is flying."

What you gonna do? Get mad? Or realize that, despite the crappy language, there is valuable nugget in there. Something you can improve. "Okay, this dickhead is having trouble realizing which way the ship is orientated. Why is that? What could I do to improve that?"

What people are telling you is that given the length of time you developed this thing, it's clear that you could improve your learning process. Does that mean anybody calling you stupid? No of course not. If we thought you were stupid we wouldn't bother saying anything at all. Personally I wsih I was doing as much as you when I was your age. But I was literally too stupid at the time.

Even if it seems harsh, somebody taking time to write thorough critique for you is a big sign of respect. They giving you time. The delivery and tone can be completely ignored. The fact that they giving you time is them directly saying, "I care about you and I want to help."

Even if it's Drill Instructor calling you a MFer and spitting in your face, what they really are saying is, "You are part of my team and want to help you."

There is only one thing to measure by: results. You do some work and now it's time to reassess it. The only thing to measure is the results. Forget any theories and preconceptions you have -- just look and see exactly what is there. Did you meet the goal or not? If not, what limited you? Maybe it's a silly personal thing that got in the way, maybe just some knowledge you didn't have. Maybe you got a habit of drinking coke every night at 9pm, which makes it hard to sleep. So then you sleep till noon and are groggy until 6pm. Then you get a coupple hours of distracted work done. Maybe thats the stupid reason you don't meet your goal. Whatever. Just an example to illustrate the kind of self-assessment you got to do. In my experience, the kind of things that limit people from reaching their goals is usually stupid crap like this. It almost never has anything to do with forces beyond their control, but rather simple matters of discipline and habits.

You just fix one thing at a time and keep going. Stay focused. If you block yourself off from critique by others, you'll carry same habit into your self-critique. And if thats the case, just forget it all. You finished.

 

Hold up. I don't think we're on the same page. Believe me I understand the value in whats been said here. Some of my comments were meant to be flippant.

The thing is my work has always been a source of pride. That's not to say I will take critique the wrong way (I understand these are opposing personality traits). Though some of what ZombieGorilla has said here just feels ad hominem. Dunno why I apologized in deleting a certain post earlier... that's something to work on. Part of me wants to avoid conflict the other part is sick and tired of worrying about what others think say or do. Its a huge struggle when I miss antidepressants (or its really early)...

I consider myself a work in progress

 

Agree with @BIGTIMEMASTER on the last post. But I do want to point one thing out.

The way we measure time invested is going to differ pretty dramatically from person to person. Although @TenKHoursDev worked on this for years, what exactly did that process look like? My guess is that it was not on a "put at least 4 hours a day in" - but more like a "some weeks I did a couple hours of work - which mostly was me trying to remember everything and I tweeked a number to feel like I did something".

If OP was working full time on this for years, I would definitely say that they should be looking at hanging up the spurs. But who knows what the actual work schedule looked like. It was probably chaotic and scattered and mixed with a variety of other things, full of tangents.

My main complaint with this thread is that people are judging @TenKHoursDev according to their own assumptions not reading the points that OP made and judging based on that alone.

For example, OP never claimed this was a complete project. All he did was make a few notes about mistakes he made. We the readers made assumptions in our responses: "this isn't a proper post mortem", "this isn't something you can call a mature project", "you aren't being hard enough on yourself" etc.

I just don't think the harsh feedback is warranted based on his posts. Too many people are putting words in his mouth that he never said.

 

You throw up your S*** on the internet, it's gonna be judged. That's why you put it up right?

But you understand that nobody else knows who you really are or what you've been going through. That's why you don't take anything personal. You just look for the useful data and apply it as necessary.

That's why I say, don't bother defefnding yourself. It's waste of time.

In the army new people always have trouble with this. They try to do something, they don't do it right, so you hammer them with negative feedback. The smart ones just say, "roger that" and then they try again. The slower ones try to explain themselves. Then you really punish them. Because excuses waste everybody time and indicate a loser mentality. Nobody needs excuses, they need results. It's not wrong to try and fail, but it is wrong to attempt to justify your failure. The correct thing is try again. And again, and again. And any data you can use to make your next attempt go better, you use. It's just that simple.

 

Sure. And I'm judging the posts in response and finding some of them lacking.

I think people often can't separate their own feelings and experiences from the literal text their reading and tend to project too much.

 

So what are you saying? We may have hurt somebodies feelings? Is tat your critique of my critique?

I mean of course I am projecting. I am sharing lessons learned from my life with another person. I am making assumptions they are doing something similar to what I once did and giving them the insider knowledge about how i fixed that.

 

No. I'm saying:

"I just don't think the harsh feedback is warranted based on his posts. Too many people are putting words in his mouth that he never said."

 

Okay? So it can just be ignored then.

 

^^^^^

 

Ok. So yo don't like my "harsh" critique. I don't agree. It wasn't harsh. Some of it may have been useful, and despite some initial defensiveness I think 10k hours got the point.

Jumping in to say, "you guys aren't being fair! don't listen to them!" sidelined forward momentum and introduced a bad attitude. And also it's insultingi the OP. They are intelligent adult who can decide is criticism is useful or not.

 

Dude, I don't have problems with harsh critiques. My main problem is that you are asserting earlier that he "wasn't being hard enough on himself" - when I think he probably was, which is probably why he posted the post mortem as a way to put the project to bed.

If you scroll up, I was the first person to add a harsh critique to this thread after a bunch of "go get 'em" responses.

Honestly, I am not really interested in arguing this further. It isn't doing anyone any good and isn't useful for anyone.

 

Well, if you think 4 years for that result is fine... fine. I think it there is much to be improved, and I know some good methods for improving at a faster rate. So I share them.

 

Even at the prototype stage, little details can make a world of difference on how your project is perceived. You could make it a space themed game by making the background black. Downloading a free spaceship from the asset store. Making the cubes a different color and maybe make them glow or download some free asteroids. And have them blow up or at least disappear when you shoot them. Or you could texture your A10, add a unity terrain with some free speed trees and add some ground targets that blow up. Small changes that would take barely any time and your prototype may even be fun to play.

 

Huh? You really need to read and understand what ad hominem is.

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Ok, going to close this down for a variety of reasons.
1. It's pretty far off topic.
2. It really wasn't on topic?!? While the obvious understanding is the OP wanted feedback, they are demonstrating that they actually don't and would rather argue and provide excuses and "talk" about their capabilities than display them.
3. It's not a postmortem by any stretch of the imagination.
4. It not going anywhere that is beneficial to anyone.
5. At best, a discussion on the project would belong in WIP, or if completed Made With Unity.

And finally, for everyone, and the future, General Discussion is the not place to start a topic like "I want to talk about about a half finished prototype I literally gave up on 2 years ago, because I didn't plan or know what I was doing, even though I am really awesome, but don't say anything bad, I don't really want feedback, I just want to talk about me." That is more of a Twitter thing.