Pit Boss: Pre-Mortem - The Final Update

Well... that's (almost) all, folks. Pit Boss is wrapping up it's development. We've now gone through a 2 rounds of playtesting, an open beta, and MANY iterations on everything from control schemes to sound management. While we hoped for development to play out differently, there were certainly lessons learned along the way. But first, what's been changed since the last playtest.

From our second playtest, we moved from a webGL to Windows build which seemed to resolve the vast majority of our crashes. However, removing obvious crashes revealed many of the bugs still present in  the AI and movement systems. While a number of these were able to be resolved for the final version (fixing nav meshes, making movement more fluid, general optimizations), there were a number of bugs in the AI system especially I would've liked to address but did not have the time. There will be more to discuss here in the post-mortem, but there were a number of updates here that helped tremendously in making the game feel more complete for the course deadline.

One of the largest critiques was in information presentation. The goal of the game, as well as player feedback and enemy identification, were very unclear. This required a number of iterations to get down, but we believe information in the final version is much easier to understand. Minimizing the information presented to the player by only showing winners from each poker table, and mapping green to a customer win and red to a cheater win, the game is substantially easier to navigate. I also expanded on the cheater ID system by adding in red outlines on both the security camera system and associated color outlines while the player is zoomed in on a given customer. Along with sound and HUD identifiers for catching cheaters or falsely accusing customers, these changes helped the gameplay feel significantly more complete.

There were also some "juice" touch ups that were desperately needed that unfortunately got pushed to end of development. Firstly, the security cameras finally have post processing! While I had to add without the static sounds I've been waiting for, it is much more satisfying to use now. Similarly, NPCs were given better outlines and various colorings as described above. This also faced an unfortunate roadblock in that the NPCs still have their whitebox models, but perhaps the simpler models lend better to the futuristic environment. Otherwise, a number of smaller touch ups were able to be made (cheater spawn rates, preventing player camera from going through walls, removing voice pitches) that made the experience feel much cleaner and more cohesive.

Overall, the project is in a fine state for what it needs to be right now. While I would've preferred something closer to a portfolio project, I'm glad it was able to function as a learning experience for the team and we were just able to have a good time.

Until next time, signing off. 

-Dan