Well we are well and truly back to work now. Unfortunately that means I don’t have any grand event or story to tell this week. We’ve pretty much just been working away at the game without any major milestones passing.
What has been going on is a whole lot of planning for the rest of the semester and the lead up to PAX.
So this has seen me not really doing any actual game design at all. The rest of the team are working away getting our levels and puzzles and sounds and everything in order. Instead, I’ve been working on Design Documentation, production timelines and task management.
And, it’s actually been pretty great.
Our main tasks this week was to present our release plan – this is essentially a reflection on the last semester and our plan for the coming semester.
First of all we went over what we had learned from our play tests, then how we had re-scoped our project for the rest of the year.
Due to our group having scrapped our game and started an entirely new game over the break, we had to approach this a little differently. Most of the playtest data we had recorded wasn’t really relavent any more.
However, we had managed to learn quite abit about how to approach and prepare for a playtest. Our first playtest had been a bit of a disaster. Our build was not stable enough to run, our computer did not have functioning sound and our UI instructions did not work properly.
So one of my tasks this semester is to write up a proper play testing strategy, so that everyone knows what we are doing with each playtest, and everyone knows what we are trying to learn from each playtest.
And finally, I have been mapping out a timeline for us.
One of the other producers found a really useful tool for creating gantt charts out of task lists in Asana. Massive thanks to @RubyDev_Lin for finding this great resource and bringing it to everyone’s attention.
So here is our timeline:
So our plan is to have a lock on all of our mechanics and puzzles very soon. I’m very keen to ensure that we have as much time as possible to polish and refine, rather than continue to create more new stuff.
There is also about a month before PAX where there is nothing in particular booked in. This time is reserved to make sure we have the best build we can, and also just in case there is some sort of emergency and we need extra time.
But, yeah, as you can see, we have plenty to do, and not a whole lot of time left!