Eclipse's Escape Pre-Production Postmortem

Hi there, Eclipse here from the team, doing a little commentary of our project's production.

Escape is our group's capstone project as senior year students of DePaul University. Of course, the lot of us who made this game were largely a pickup team in university, though there were a handful of us who had stuck together working in some other projects in class. I believe about half of us had this distinction. Our initial game concept pitch was borne largely out of an idea from this portion of the team, but a significant portion of the introductory process also consisted of concept pitching.

We had decided very head on that we would go with a 2D game on Unity because it played the best way to our strengths. None of us were not that great with modeling (it is a curriculum requirement, but I personally did not enjoy the times I had to do 3D modeling. Most of my projects that I had done during my time at the uni were all 2D based.

Almost simultaneously to deciding what concept we wanted to use was defining scope for the game. The critical elements we decided was that it had to be one single level (or at least able to adapt into endless gameplay), did not require so many high quality assets (we had 20 weeks, plus spring break to do this project!), and still provided engaging gameplay after all of the above.

I think this whole pre-production process took two weeks, at which point we sent our pitch to our instructor William Myers. Will is a really cool person - one of my best mentors, in my opinion, but he had provided invaluable guidance for our team's creative process.

If you want to go out of the way to read our pre-production documentation, I have provided some of our team's brainstorm/design material in this Google Drive link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1b3QbBWZQKsFs1-BQYsuc8ac_g8PmRvkv

At some point, I will create a postmortem for the project in general, but I am waiting for the response from some of my colleagues to see if we are down to do an audio commentary format.

Michael G - ECT