Milestone 6 — Post Mortem
GAME 1303 · Week 16 — Tuesday, December 8 · Live presentation + written retrospective · 5 points
The deliverable
Two parts:
- A 5-minute presentation to the class about what happened while making your game.
- A written retrospective, submitted in Canvas.
A post mortem is the standard practice at the end of a real production. It is not a victory lap and it is not an apology. It is an honest account of what worked, what didn't, and what you now know that you didn't in August.
Nothing here is graded on whether your game succeeded. A game that fell apart, examined clearly, scores full marks. A game that shipped well, described vaguely, does not.
The presentation — 5 minutes
Show the game running while you talk. Cover:
1. What you set out to make — 30 seconds.
Your Week 2 pitch, in one sentence.
2. What you actually made — 30 seconds.
The same sentence, revised to describe the shipped game. If they're different, that difference is your most interesting material.
3. What went right — 90 seconds.
Three specific things. Not "the art turned out okay" — which decision, made when, that paid off. "Switching from smooth locomotion to teleport in Week 12 fixed the nausea complaints and took two hours."
4. What went wrong — 90 seconds.
Three specific things, with the cost. Not "I ran out of time" — what consumed the time, and what it cost you.
5. What you'd tell yourself in Week 1 — 60 seconds.
The single most useful part for the room. Be concrete.
The written retrospective
Two to four pages, PDF. The presentation sections above, expanded, plus:
Playtest evidence
What your Ex 10 testers hit, what you changed as a result, and what you knowingly left unfixed. Reference your PlaytestLogger data or session notes. Specific observations, not "people liked it."
Scope accounting
| Planned at pitch | what you said in Week 2 |
| Shipped | what's in the build |
| Cut, and when | the list, with dates |
Cutting well is the skill this course teaches most. A clear cut list is evidence you learned it.
Time
Roughly where the hours went — art, mechanic, levels, UI, debugging, builds. Estimates are fine. Almost everyone discovers the split was nothing like what they expected, and that discovery is the point.
What you'd build next
Given another eight weeks: fix, cut, or start over? Why?
Writing it honestly
The strongest post mortems name a specific decision and follow it through to its consequence:
❌ I should have managed my time better.
✅ I spent Weeks 6 through 9 making character animations for a game whose core mechanic still wasn't tuned. By Week 10 the animations looked good and the jump still felt wrong, and I had to rebuild movement in the same week I was building menus. I should have frozen art until the mechanic was locked.
The second version is useful to you and to everyone listening. The first is not.
You are not graded on how well the project went. Every professional post mortem worth reading is mostly about failures.
Submission
- Written retro:
lastname_postmortem.pdf, 2–4 pages - Where: Canvas → Assignments → Post Mortem
- Due: start of class. Presentations run through the class period.
- Bring your game running and ready to show. Have it open before class starts.
Rubric — 5 points
| Criterion | Pts | Met when |
|---|---|---|
| Presentation delivered | 1 | Presented to the class within time, game shown running |
| Specific analysis | 2 | Three concrete things that worked and three that didn't, each with its decision and consequence named |
| Playtest evidence | 1 | References real observations from Ex 10 and what changed because of them |
| Written retro | 1 | Submitted, complete, includes scope accounting and time breakdown |
Common failure modes
- Generic lessons. "Plan better, start earlier" applies to every project ever made and describes yours not at all.
- Only positives. Reads as defensive and loses the analysis points.
- Only negatives. Something went right. Find three.
- No playtest reference. You ran the tests in Week 14 — the notes are already written.
- Game not ready to show. Five minutes is short; two of them spent finding the build is expensive.
The last class
This is the end of the course. Bring the game, be honest about it, and listen to everyone else's — sixteen post mortems in one afternoon is the densest design education available, and most of the useful things you learn today will come from someone else's mistakes rather than your own.
fin