POST/MORTEM

There were a lot of triumphs, struggles, and lessons to be learned from the development of VRTA/BRAE. 

The roses definitely included our united our group became towards the end of development. Our final push into the Github felt like a huge weight off our shoulders and scrolling through the week of work we had put in felt like climbing a mountain. We were all stoked to have a working game, which had seemed so far a week prior to submission. Our animations were smooth, music looped, and shooting killed enemies. We were especially proud of the death animation and original sound, which were definitely heard and seen a lot during final playtesting. 

Our struggles were what led to such a strong final push. We lacked a great communication medium, with Discord being our one method of contact. As a result, not many check-in or progress meetings were had, and work got pushed off. Midterm season got the best of everyone, and it was hard to find the motivation and time individually to sit down and grind through the code. Asynchronously creating a game didn't lead to the best Beta that it could have, and a lot of our pieces didn't work together seamlessly. This gave us a serious wake up call to get things in motion, which happened through late nights fighting the clock, as we all had free schedules to burn the midnight oil. 

What did we learn? Well, it's a lot easier to build a game together, for starters. Being on call and letting each other know when a Git push was about to happen let us make sure all our work was backed up and ready to be updated. Additionally, we worked in small commits, where nothing huge was added in one go, preventing the catastrophic destruction of another person's work. Discord screensharing was also an extremely helpful tool, as we could debug together and cut down on time drastically by catching small errors for each other. For the future, starting early and keeping momentum throughout the development process are just as important as finishing strong. 

When it's all said and done, we're proud of what we made. Thank you to everyone who playtested, gave us feedback, and supported us when it was down to the wire. We hope you enjoy our creation.