Dev Log 4: Post-Production

The final few weeks of production went smoothly, with most of us focusing on fixing minor bugs such as Level 2 somehow suddenly not redirecting to Level 3 properly. My only responsibility this past week was just to implement the Credits screen. We also focused on preparing the game showcase presentation script and talking about possibly getting ready to maybe think about starting the project post-mortem probably soon™.

Reflecting on our original scope, we had to cut down on quite a few features. We had initially planned five different levels with up to 10 different characters, each with three separate Good/Neutral/Bad endings. Turns out it was much more difficult to script and implement 30 endings in the span of a few months, especially when we each had to juggle multiple assignments from other classes. With that being said, however, I’m still pretty proud of what we’ve created. We refined our original message by taking the online McGill Financial Literacy course (thanks Wojciech!) and being able to deliver a more concise experience.

While working on the game showcase presentation, I noticed how dry our game is. Not necessarily in a negative manner, but a lot of the “teaching” parts of the game was just info dump that would often mentally overload our playtesters, while extra dialogue originally intended to breathe life into the characters and give the player a momentary reprieve from stocks, GICs, and retirement planning was also tedious to read through since they just clicked through 20 dialogue boxes of info dump just seconds prior. Long story short- it is pretty darn hard to make a game simultaneously educational and entertaining. Maybe the next time I tackle a game with a message, I’ll rely more on using humorous metaphors (not unlike what Team Tree Frogs did), instead of being so literal with the central message.