Project 1 Post Mortem aka Bees Bitches!

So from the beginning our lovely Bee game was plagued with problems.  Mainly that we were forced to use a fairly new framework with horrible documentation and barely any community.  It was characterized unanimously as a very powerful framework that you should only use if you are not a beginner and have ample time to get over the steep learning curve.  Naturally we didn't have either of those, but like we always do, we went hard to the paint and learned that crap anyway.

Engineering
Once I did a few tutorials things started to come together fairly well, at least for me.  Nikhil spent a solid week and a half learning Lua and Moai, which was fairly aggravating, but once he actually started coding he was fast and produced quality code.  Chunran on the other hand was less helpful.  He did get the initial playable build up and running, but between the massive language barrier and his inexperience with any kind of version control it ended up being more trouble than it was worth to even use him.  When he did try to produce code it was usually buggy and based on old code.  Still, all of this probably could have been avoided if we had better leadership and direction, which brings me to my next point.

Production
So for production, none of us including our producer really knew what it was a producer was supposed to do.  This led to our producer being MIA most of the production cycle without anybody really caring.  We as engineers knew what had to get done and we did it, we didn't need a producer keeping us on track.  Once we got close to the end however, we realized it would probably have been better if we discussed everything with the producer on a more regular basis and kept ourselves on track that way.  This probably could have helped with Chunran being inadvertently cut out of the loop since our producer can speak Chinese among other things.  Ah well, after watching an entire prototype cycle I think we all have a better idea now what a producer can and should do so I’ll know what to expect next time.

Art
We didn't have an artist, so all our art is just jacked from the internet.  It looks pretty enough.  Luckily our producer is pretty good at Photoshop and I used to dabble quite a bit with Fireworks.  Between the two of us we created good enough art to make the prototype look somewhat presentable.  I’m very quickly learning the value of having a myriad of skills.

Conclusion
Overall, despite everything being somewhat problematic, I think it was a very strong learning experience and nobody is really to blame.  Nikhil and I ended up taking over the project and doing most of the work, but as I said above it was just as much our responsibility to speak up when something wasn’t working right as it was for the guys who weren’t working right.  I look forward to the next project with new members and a better understanding of how this stuff is supposed to go down.  Also, XNA, wooooo!