Music and Cats? Feel the Rhythm! No..Feline The Rhythm!

Post Mortem Report

Developer: Feline Creative   

Publisher: Joss Moo-Young

Release Date: April 21, 2023

Platforms: PC

Number of Developers: Five

Length of Development: Fifteen Weeks

Budget: $0.00

Development Tools: VS, Aseprite, Clip Studio Paint

Introduction

In a far distant planet away from earth, you are a cat teacher at a kittengarten full of mischievous little kitten. Being the mischievous little creatures kittens are, they are planning one of their biggest heists yet! Your class instruments are in danger! You must go catch the little kittens and bring them back to the kittengarten alongside your stolen instruments!

Feline The Rhythm is a progressive rhythm game that's all about cute cats and music! It’s meant to be a very breezy and cute game with feline rhythm as the main dish.

What Went Well 

Communication

It didn’t take us very long to figure out what we were doing. The first time the five of us got together to discuss ideas to see if these were the people we wanted to work with, it only took around roughly 15 minutes to decide. 

All of us talked a lot about what genre we want, what program or language we plan on using for the project, what the main mechanics will be and so on. This took place mainly in-person during the time that we had left over after classes. We would continuously talk about our game as much as possible not only to come up with ideas, but also to keep ourselves motivated.

During the times when we weren’t meeting in-person, we would communicate mostly through discord messages or calls. We spent some time together outside of our project as well, playing games together so that we become more comfortable with each other.

Despite discussing ideas often, it can be very easy for those ideas to be left behind after the conversation is over, resulting in being forgotten from our minds. To prevent this, we wrote down notes, and drew diagrams to organize these ideas while also being able to remember them for the future when the ideas are implemented into the code itself. 

Learning from feedback

Feedback provided during and after class was extremely useful to make better decisions and have a better understanding of where our game was going. 

We took the feedback/criticism and started discussing our next course of action as soon as we were able to meet as a group right after the presentations. It also gave us an opportunity to look back on our work up until then, and talk about what went wrong, what we did well, and what could be improved. 

We managed to get a better understanding of what we wanted the game to be and how to evolve it going forward, as well as how we, as a team, should improve for the future milestone.

Decision making

Our team’s biggest strength was that when it came to making decisions, we were quite fast with it. If there was a decision to be made regarding our game, we would lay out the options/ideas that we had, discuss what each of our thoughts were on it, and come to an agreement at the end of the discussion. 

It was never uncomfortable as all of us were already quite comfortable with sharing our thoughts to each other, and we all knew to respect each other’s opinions. As for how the actual decision was concluded, we would do a quick vote after voicing each of our opinions on the matter, and as usual, it ended with majority wins. 

Being able to make decisions quickly helped a lot with shortening the amount of time that went into making said decisions, and using that time to work on the actual game itself instead. 

What Didn’t Go Well

Organization

Coordination was lacking during our time together as a group. It was good at the start of our journey, as with many other aspects, we divided our responsibilities, set our roles and started organizing what each of us would do for our first milestone. Jira was set up to track progress of our development, what was going to be done, bugs needed to be solved, and who was working on what task. 

We would have occasional talks about what's next for our game and what steps were next to take, but it wasn’t enough later on. Not every member of the group was often aware of what was about to come next, so it made progressing with individual work harder. Jira was also stopped being used.

Yes, after our feedback time in class we would discuss and set out the goals each one of us would get done for our next review, but outside of class we lacked any kind of organization despite having good constant communication with each other, combining with the next point coming up, this would add up to the pile of last time responsibilities that the group would have as a whole to deliver our game on time, having to make last minute decisions and meetings to figure out what our next step was going to be.

We tried to come to specific days and times during the week where we would hold meetings to discuss our advancements of our project, ideas, and overall work as a group. It did work for some time until morale started to lack yet again.

Time management

One of our biggest flaws was time management. More than often we would put our production responsibilities at the last second, meaning we had to rush our work and barely have something ready to show. 

It is true we had other responsibilities from other courses, but there were definitely time frames where we could’ve dedicated more work to our production game. We would start working on our game after Production class, it was as like we got some adrenaline rush to feel recharged and work on it, but soon after that adrenaline rush, it was just that, a sudden short rush of energy that would vanish in a couple of hours, after that, it would be days after getting any actual work done.

Morale

Our morale, where do we start? At the start of the semester and the Production 2 course, it was exciting, just coming off from production 1 and having a very positive outcome with our games and experience overall, we came into Production 2 with the best positive attitude and highest hopes for our future game. 

We gathered ideas around the classroom and settled for our groups. As a group, our enthusiasm for the idea of our game was big, and by big we wanted to actually pull off something really really good and unique. We organized ourselves, separated the roles, started sketching concepts, writing ideas, throwing references, we were having fun, we looked forward to the rest of the semester.

Some time after our first peer evaluation, it felt as if the world was crumbling around us. Morale just started going down from that point. We could not gather the same energy around our conversations for the game, progress started to slow down, the excitement we had at the start to make our game a unique rhythm experience was diminishing fast.

What did we do to try and fix our morale? As a team we tried bonding more outside of Discord calls and playing games together, we tried outdoor activities, went to eat together, went to the mall or just hung out together, we even did some karaoke! As much fun as it was, sadly, it didn’t help much in the end, going back to work felt like a slap in the face by reality itself.

How Things Changed From Milestone to Milestone

The journey to the first milestone could only be described as a bumpy road. We had an idea of what we wanted to do, what the basic mechanics were, and so on as we started by organizing our ideas into a game design document. The first decision that was made was our game’s genre. 

We wanted to make a hybrid of a rhythm game and a shooting game. A rhythm shooter, if you will. We came up with the story for our game next. All of us in Feline Creative love cats (as per our team and game name), and we were all down to make something cute. Hence, the birth of the kittengarten. After the story, naturally the game mechanics followed. 

The first planned mechanic of our game at the time was that the player dodges the enemy bullets, while shooting their own bullets at the timing of falling notes. The player’s bullets would only do meaningful damage if it was shot on the timing of the note. 

The game would indicate to the player the accuracy of their shots from missed, good, great to perfect. There would be a combo system, which keeps track of the notes that are hit in succession from great to perfect only, and the combo would work as a damage multiplier. 

The enemies would behave differently according to the current track as well. The playing music would affect the type of enemy the stage would spawn, along with the way their attacks worked. 

We had a rather clear vision of our game. The problem was we didn’t know how we were going to achieve it. 

We tried to narrow down our game’s mechanics as much as possible to the bare core. The result was the player cat shooting beams with random spawning enemies on a white background. That was our first playable.

We started to realize after releasing the first playable that maybe we won’t be able to include all the mechanics that we had planned. We quickly had to start organizing our planned mechanics into a priority list.

One of the other main features of our game was going to be a buff and debuff system with different shaped notes. This feature ended up being the last on our priority list, and, spoiler, did not make it to the release of the game. 

For Alpha, we worked towards having the rhythm game section of our game implemented and 50% of assets completed. By the end of it, we had our main base mechanics down. We had a beatmap (although rather short), a boss sprite, and some more assets in progress for polish. 

We did realize, however, that a few things needed to change. Originally for alpha, we only had one key for shooting input, which we noticed would make the game harder for sections that required spamming. So the plan was to assign 4 keys in total for shooting inputs. 

The other changes that we needed were not with the actual game itself, but us in general. Our first release and alpha presentations, to be frank, were not the best. It was quite obvious that our presentations were a bit uncoordinated. This was a result of our bad time management. 

We did our best to fix the problems and improve productivity, but our conditions got worse with time. As a result, this reflected into our beta. 

We didn’t have much of a difference in our build in comparison to the alpha. We had a new title screen and game over screen, but gameplay-wise, there were not many changes or additions. Roughly half of our game’s assets that were made didn’t make it into the actual game itself. 

Realizing how serious the problem is, our team got back together to discuss the following build. We decided to prioritize completing a game that has a definitive start and end. As a result of this, we made the decision to drop one of our core mechanics, which changed our game’s genre as a whole. 

In the end, Feline The Rhythm went from a rhythm shooter hybrid to a regular rhythm game.

Lessons Learned

Intentions vs. Reality

We began this project with a lot of excitement and ideas. We were eager to create something that we all could be happy with in the end. The ideas we had were all quite ambitious, we admit, and the concepts that we discussed, we thought were going to be a really good fit for the game. 

However, the reality was that our abundance of ideas became a case of feature creep. Even though these ideas only existed on document, and we tried to prioritize the core aspects of the game, it resulted in stopping us from productive development of the game. 

If we had realized this sooner, and managed to drop the ideas that were hindering our performance, we likely would have ended with a game that we were happier about. 

The Positives

Communication

We plan on placing greater emphasis on communication, as it is and always will be the most important factor in keeping up productivity. Frequent communications on what’s going on, and what problems we are facing will assist in making sure our work flows as it should.

Learning from feedback

We will place further importance on keeping feedback from peers in mind as we go on, as it has proven to provide us with a lot of direction during the development. 

Decision making

Continuing onwards, we will keep up our efficiency with making decisions as it was essential in giving us time for the game’s development.

The Negatives

Organization

We will make sure to discuss and assign our tasks with better deadlines and tracking, making more use of the tool Jira, to track our progress and tasks completed.

Time management

Managing a better schedule for our meetings and work time for the game, not waiting until the last week of work to start moving forward, respecting deadlines and taking advantage of time off between other courses.

Morale

Try to have a more positive view on our work, have more realistic outcomes and features, not get overwhelmed by accumulated deadlines. Speak up for our mental health.

Final Insights and Conclusions

Although we may not have produced a game that we are fully satisfied with, it was still a very good learning experience. We hope to keep these lessons in mind moving forward so that in the future, we may develop games that we can be happy about.