Bit of a celebration of a major benchmark this week: We submitted an alpha of our game for grading!
Cue fireworks!
But before we got to that, there was a whole lot more work that needed to be done.
I was kept pretty busy getting various game elements into order (mainly relating to UI elements and audio). The other thing I was doing was playing through the game, and getting other people to play through the game, trying to find as many bugs or problems and correct them before submission on Friday.
On the bright side, we didn’t reveal any huge gamebreaking issues. There were a few level corrections, some strange character behaviours, but nothing that we couldn’t handle.
On the less-good-side, we only really managed to get character animations running properly on Wednesday. This took way too long to get up and running, and they never really got to a standard that was really great, just because we never got any time to iterate on them.
This has sort of been the running story of this semester. We take far too long to make a decision, or to get an element running, so once we DO get it running, there isn’t any time to improve or test. So, while we did well to get a functional game submitted by the deadline, I wouldn’t say that we made a particularly great game.
All-in-all it’s a little disappointing.
So now the semester is over and we have a bit of a break before we get back into it. We’re going to take a little bit of a rest from working on the game, but there is going to have to be a fair bit of work still done over the semester break.
This will be anything from improving on the submitted alpha to re-working game elements to totally starting over and questioning everything that we have done to this point.
At any rate – there should be plenty more for me to post about…
In other news: I’m still trying to work out the best day to write these posts. Friday night wasn’t working out so well, and Saturday didn’t seem to be the best option either. So I’m going to try writing on Monday for a few weeks and see how that goes – even though it will be writing about the previous week.
And: I got myself some business cards!
