Review:

The tribulations of our project were not easily overcome. With a very ambitious goal and over scheduled tasks the project fell behind in the second semester.

Concept
We needed a better one as space flight alone is too empty. Considering we stuck to the spaceflight concept it needed a lot more detail on what the space flight component of the game would contain, the concept was mainly about the style of art and what the character part would appear like. Although starting with the character component may have ended with a game you could actually play and complete. Cutting out the character completely from the spaceflight would have probably been the better choice than what we went with this time as the multimedia team was mainly working on art and areas for the character side which we intended to leave till last.

AI
AI for flying vehicles was pushed back into the second semester. This could have used with a bit more attention, but there were difficulties getting them to move at first; so anything further was out of the question.

Animations
We did not get to the point where we could utilize the character art content within Torque; animation of so many bipeds, and to the extent of the game criteria, seems utterly impossible with the amount of time at hand. Given that this is in conjunction with space flight features, the game concept entailed of almost everything; RPG, FPS, Space Sim, and Multiplayer.

Scene & Model Handling
At the beginning of the project it was estimated that problems would occur when we had to make model and scene scales larger than Torque’s usual boundaries. Rendering issues occurred when things were scaled, such as clipping and shadow inversion. AI also has difficulty flying vehicles that are too large.
As ship handling on the programming side changed over the first 2 months, animation of ships was not stressed; it would be better if the setup of ships was given a specific schema from day one; as the uniformity is a necessity within the game.

Combat & Controls
Combat needed a fair bit more attention, at least on the space-combat side of things. It lacked any design work behind it, and felt dull. Controls being the same, they were not interactive enough to provide an enjoyable level of control over the ships.

SVN
The SVN server could have been better utilized. It was set up and put on the blog as a link but never really told to anyone other than the project managers that it was there and available for use. It could have assisted greatly in the merging of code.
Although not all used it, it did serve as the backup and mediator.

Communication
Due to the new working environment, communication did not start on good ground, and altogether the multimedia and programming teams did not feel like one working entity. An envoy for each team or just simply a combined project might be more efficient. This does of course require a level of interest or motivation (alongside communication) for good output.

Management
With over scheduled tasks we did not want any one team member being encumbered with too many things to do; additionally team members had required assignments. Load balancing was introduced in cases where this was prominent; and tasks were leveled amongst the team.

Planning
Something that was overstepped; with the time constraint of the project, haste was taken over careful deliberation and the project got out of hand. Things were improvised because of this, and there was no clear lining.
A full-bodied concept including art (and model formats), dialog, features, title, and progression would be a sure way to get ahead.