Just a quick post this week. Sorry it’s late, but (as I will soon explain) there is a good reason for it!
So we are back at uni now. And we’re jumping straight into development. As our lecturer explained it: Semester 1 – make a game; Semester 2 – make it good.
Strangely, I have found myself doing almost no game development at all this last week. I’ve been totally taken up with documentation and scheduling. Part of this is due to assignments for uni, but also we have let our documentation slip a little over the break, so there is a bit to catch up on. It’s not as fun as game development, but it’s pretty important stuff, and letting it slip is not really in our best interests.
I’ve also worked out a timeline for our production this semester, including lock dates for features and levels, a rough testing schedule and major milestones.
I’ve set our major milestones around public play-testing opportunities. And that leads into the reason there was no post last night – we were running a play test at the IGDA Melbourne meet up.
We set up our latest build of LVL2 on a table and let a bunch of game developers loose on it. This was a very different experience to the Open Day play test. Game developers bring a different mind set to playing and observing games, so there was a lot more effort put into breaking things. And there were quite a few things that got broken…
On the one hand, this is great! We found out a bunch of stuff in our game that can be exploited or broken if the player does something that we hadn’t expected. Now we can go back in and try to mitigate that. On the other hand, we didn’t really manage to find out if any of the changes that we had made in response to the Open Day play test had worked, due to the different play styles of the testers.
But overall this was a very worthwhile experience, and we’re going to try to go along again as many times as we can before PAX.
And our big news – we’re going to be in the Bar SK Work-In-Progress Wednesday event for August!
So if you’re keen to check out where we are at, and maybe give us some helpful play testing data, come down to Bar SK on 23 August!