Horrors Below: a Retrospective

 With 1 week left on the game, I'd like to look back on the process, and evaluate how development went, and the development of my own skills in the process.

Firstly, the project has been greatly hampered by poor coordination and procrastination of individual team members. Our programmer is late to most lessons, often by over an hour, and procrastinates more than he works, leading to the playability of the game being significantly behind where it needs to be. Additionally, our team has been less coordinated than it ideally should be, leading to confusion among team members and even greater delay in work done. 

This experience has reinforced in me the importance of team coordination and, as well as the importance of the individual's role in a team. Individual laziness has caused significant fallout across the project as a whole, as has lack of coordination. thus, next time I undertake a similar project, I should keep in mind the importance of these principles, and try my best to enforce them. 

Still, this project has also shown me the importance of being able to adapt your idea to time, budget or skill constraints, as well as changes in artistic vision. Our concept has changed a lot through development, and our concept has had to become a lot less ambitious to match our skill level and time constraints. the original concept included non player characters, voice lines, and other mechanics that have been cut from the project entirely now. 

Finally, my skills have developed in many directions over the course of this project. I've been doing texturing, mam-making, grey boxing, pixel art, alpha mapping, UI design, and all sorts of other tasks that nobody else wants to do, allowing me to become a little more familiar with many different parts of game design. However, I do think this has hindered my ability to specialize in any particular trade, as I haven't had the chance to develop any particular skill to a professional level.

Overall, I think my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats haven't changed much over the course of this year, and my lack of specialization has continued to be a prevalent weakness that I've failed to address. I also haven't given myself the room to develop my art skills in this time, so aside from my pixel art, my art skills have developed very little in this time. 

However, my inflexibility in my vision of a game has been largely moved past. throughout this project, I've learned to go with the flow of the project, and bend my vision to the whims of my team-mates, though this has correlated with a decrease in my own personal investment in the project.

All in all, this project has allowed me to expand my list of skills and deal with some of my weaknesses, however I failed to take the initiative to further refine any of my skills to a more professional level, leading to a feeling of finishing right back where I started, whether or not this is actually the case.