Postmortem devlog

Successes

• We’ve been able to add features we wanted at the beginning like typing and interaction with keys and the little companion. 
• We’ve been able to translate the initial idea and concept from our brainstorming part to the end. 
• Characters’ drawings and animations working as they planned. Background music and sounds also work properly. We've received multiple players' kudos to the art & sound and we do think they are integral parts of the game.
• We collaborate well and communicate fast, which allows us to solve problems effectively. 

Failures

• Our game has a lot of texts in the environment and we didn't make them wisely. We used canvas and TMP UGUI for some of the texts and 3D object TMP for others. Some sprites are game objects and we had to manually drag the canvas objects to align with the game objects. 
• When we adjusted the game resolution, we realized that the canvas and the game layer don't scale in the same way. So we had to remake all the TMP UGUI into game object text to make sure that they always follow the object.
• We wrote many separate scripts in the beginning and it was hard to define which one operates what object, then we tried to reduce them.
• We had some problems with special keys “enter” and “esc” as they were typing the actual word “enter” instead of just work as a special key.

Lessons Learned

• Many cool ideas may pop up, but be more mindful of the difficulty and be ready to scale works down:
  We tried to make the levels more intuitive after our play-tests and feedback. It is important to know that some mechanics might be more intuitive for some players and some might be not. We also simplified the puzzles and levels in general, because they were hard to play. Also, too many working keys on the keyboard might be confusing for the player, even though we have the little ’tutorial’ in the opening scene. After the play-test, we decided to reduce some keys and functions, but overall the game remains the initial concept. The keyboard representation is also helping players to look at their physical keyboard to find the right letters and keys.
• Archive unused scripts rather than delete them:
  It's especially fatal when multiple people are working on the same script/ feature. Even if a script seems useless for now, it is still a good practice to keep it in an archived folder. Because you never know when you need them :)

Future Development

We would add more robust instructions and therefore give the game more affordance for variations of the core mechanics:

• Key combination: put the jelly to hold a functional key (such as ctrl or shift), type uppercase, and perform a copy & paste task.
• Broken keys: keys that can only stand no longer than several seconds, so that the player has to plan their route and move quickly.
• Add more puzzles to the next levels, so the game gradually increases the complexity. 
• We’ve been also thinking about making some levels in one scene without ‘cut’ transition for more fluid and immersive purposes. 
• We might add some other characters and enemies.