The Freewill of Life - Postmortem

We've devoted a lot to this project because we really love our concept. We started by making up the game structure and story, using assets to build our world. But no assets can perfectly fit into our fantasies, so we decided to create our own graphic assets. There are also so many details in this game, especially with the way how players access and understand the game. To fix all the problems and make it at the perfect status, we tested and debugged it over and over again. 

Successes

Some of the biggest successes of The Freewill of Life are the graphic design and the animation effects. The graphic is at a very high level, and the style is so unique that it fits the topic of our game well. The animation is made frame by frame from the graphics, and the results are quite smooth. With the sound effects being added to the relevant animation, the style and feel of our game become really systematic. We use the same graphic elements to decorate each level, and the colors are highly coincidental with each other. Some screenshots from the game: 

There are also some other advantage points this game, one of the most important things is the concept. We think the structure of our game created non-linear narrative storytelling, and the result of gameplay would take players to different levels. So there is no real death or game over. the players can choose to quit the game or not, but if they don't want to, they can stick in the loop forever to experience the journey.

Failures

I would say that there are obvious failures of this game, but definitely things we could make improvements to. One of the most important things is the level design. Technically speaking, there isn't really any super hard game mechanics, and the start level (level 0, The Beginning of Life) and the under world level (level -1) are both quite easy. the difference is that we made level -1 relatively longer to increase the game experience. Some of the problems that happened in the game are with collecting counting. We realized that the counts would accumulate after we "die" in the level and start again, and the collectible objects would refresh again and again (But we just fixed that!). 

Lessons Learned

We've learned a lot from this experience. The testing and debugging process could always make people learn a lot. We figured that we need a better design process thinking about the scene setup, the enemy distribution, and relevant number design. If we could have discussed it before making it directly in unity we might save a lot more time. Another experience is that we could have used more prefabs to save time. A lot of the work we've done again and again could be actually achieved easily from prefabs, but sometimes we just forget to do that first, and publishing with Unity Collab may cause the loss.

Future Development

For future development, we would really like to continue with the graphic style and adding more levels. Since our game is a story about life, we think there could definitely be more stages breaking down from the concept of "life." Designing more metaphors is another thing we consider doing. The metaphors would be also coming from the real-life journey, in which case we can transfer more characters and real-life businesses into a digital fantasy world. We believe more research should be done in searching for relevant philosophical theories, news, and projects done by other people. 

Our design process and methodology could also improve in the future. If we have more time to work on it, we would like to make more sketches first about the game structure and interactive design, and possibly create player journey maps, as well as having more players to test with it.