Post Mortem

Given the timeframe we were given for this project, we are happy with the amount of work we had gotten done and all the components and features we added to our engine. If we had an additional 8 weeks to work on the game engine we would mainly focus on cross compatibility, polishing our GUI’s, and game interactions. Our current game engine is designed for the Windows Operating System, however our group did consist of two MacOS user’s. Due to our decision to focus on a specific OS, there were a few features that didn’t translate over to the MacOS. For example, once a tilemap is loaded the user is able to use the “A” and “D” keys to navigate through each of the tiles. However, a major problem we ran into is this functionality isn’t present for the mac users. 

The current implementation of our tilemap and sprite editors perform their tasks correctly, however there can be more functionality for user accessibility. We encountered a few inconveniences while using our editors which we would address with the additional time. Once the settings were inputted for the tilemap editor, the only way to view all of the tiles is to use the “A” and “D” keys. To address this, we could add a section in the editor that displays the tilemap bmp which highlights the current tile the user is on. For our sprite editor, we do not have a zoom in feature. This makes it hard to work with smaller spritesheets because the individual sprites are very hard to get captured in our frame. 

The main inspiration of our game engine is Super Mario Maker, however it is a very simplified version but offers more customizability through python scripts, such as more control over the movement of the player. There are a few interactions that we had as stretch goals that never made it to the engine, such as audio, a more complex physics system, coin counter, win conditions, and possibly another level. With additional time, we would have liked to be able to accomplish cross compatibility between different operating systems, a more user friendly GUI, and additional features for our game engine.