What I’d change.

Having got to the point that the primary game play and graphical elements have been completed, I am beginning to look back and thinking what I would change if I could re-do the project from the ground up.

While this is a bit of an upsetting prospect to see how it could be made better, it will let me see what may be best next time.

Camera
One of the biggest thing to cause my issue is the camera – having changed several times during the creation of the game, I am still not happy with it, though its current incarnation gives me the least problems.

Had it been rotating, the controls would have kept skewing at certain angles causing block pushing to become very difficult.

The over the shoulder camera would have required greater attention to detail in the modelling, nicer textures, (Both of what I did anyway) but most importantly, would have gotten caught on the terrain in such an enclosed environment. While it may have been ok in places, catching raised terrain in the camera would have been a nightmare.

First person is simply a big no no here. You would end up just seeing the boxes. You’d never see what you where doing!

Controls
Not such a problem here, but I would certainly have liked to consider the control scheme for iPhone from the beginning.

Had I made it mouse based, I could have easily made it touch based. As it stands, I am stuck with keyboard input for now.


Animation
My big problem here is due to my inexperience I had to choose between having an idle pose and walk cycle or having a walk cycle OR having a walk cycle and a ‘push’ animation.

The push animation looked better, so I took it!
Hopefully in the future I will not have to have limited animations. With a better grasp of what I am doing I can better experiment and repair mistakes.


Style

The style of the game fits quite well with the mechanic, I’d like to do a game in which the graphics do not take as long to create.

Perhaps a game made entirely of squares!
Hang on, I did that for my honours project in my undergraduate. Maybe not!