I thoroughly enjoyed working on Space-Time Slip this semester, and feel that I have gained a lot of knowledge regarding game development; in particular I feel much more confident in the overall process of making a game. One of my greatest achievements from this is that I feel very comfortable working in the Unity engine, after teaching myself how to use it throughout the project, and I would be able to utilise this knowledge to learn how to work with other engines, such as Unreal. I feel that some of the code is not particularly optimised, as there are a lot of scripts that have access to a lot of random objects, such as the collider manager having access to individual UI components, but these would be easy to fix by combining and creating larger more general scripts, such as a UI manager.

With the project itself, I was unable to achieve all of my design goals but I feel that I achieved my personal goals of developing a fully functional IOS game, and ensuring that I can make an almost bug-free game that is intuitive and responsive. A main goal of Space-Time Slip was to ensure that playing the game felt good; I achieved this with the core gameplay loop, and responsive UI, as everyone I handed an iPod to at the Barclays Games Frenzy 2023 was immediately addicted. Feedback from everyone who has played recent builds, and those at the Frenzy, showed that the game is not easy to put down and evokes that “just one more level” feeling.

Whilst this is true, there are clearly elements that are not in the game. The main missing piece is the feature that allows the player to encounter other civilisations; there are no other city assets so the player can only encounter Rome. The process of implementing this would be simple, as it is only a case of adding a new city sprite and changing the sprite when a specific year is reached, but I did not have time to create the art for the deadline.

I would have liked to have added a custom hub world on the surface that, every hundred years or so, allows the player to upgrade a building. Upgrading a building a building would have minor improvements for the player, such as a higher launch or making near misses worth more. When a building becomes fully upgraded, the player then has access to a new module. This system would be in place of the player visiting specific civilisations, but it allows for the player to have more choices and control. I eventually plan to implement this system, when I pick the project up at a later date, but it was too broad in scope to add before the current deadline.

The module system, whilst on a good foundation, also needs building up and more upgrades are needed. I have currently only implemented 3 (the X-15 companion upgrade does not actually work), but I planned to implement 6. However, the 3 that are in the game work well and change the core gameplay only slightly, whilst giving the player more options. Unfortunately, none of the upgrades change the look of the rocket, simply due to the time needed to create the art.

Having reached the end of the development time, I feel that I underestimated the time needed to produce all of the art. In the future, I need to plan more time for this, or hire an artist separately to take on this workload.

With all that said, I plan to continue the project later down the line, adding all of the necessary art and systems, so that I can fully release it on the App Store.