Assignment 17
Final Release

Due: Wednesday, May 8th at 11:59 pm

During the last week of class, you will present the "final" release of your game. This will be your last presentation before the GDIAC Showcase, which will follow a week later. While it is okay to make minor changes between the final presentation and Showcase (your final project grade will be determined by what you turn in at Showcase), the game that you present as your final release should be something that you are comfortable making available for download.

Presentation

Unlike previous presentations, we will not double-up this time. Presentations in lecture will be seen by everyone. Most of your presentation should be spent playing the game. You should take us through the early levels and discuss how your level progression works. We have seen individual levels from you; now we want to see how they fit together.

However, for this presentation, we have a new rule. Everyone on the team must take a turn talking during the presentation. This is the end of a team effort, and we are not allowing the presentation to be the voice of one person. Ideally, each of you should talk about something in the game that you did that you were really proud of. However, we will leave the division up to you. It is only okay for someone to not talk during the presentation if that person is the one giving the postmortem.

Postmortem

The last 5 minutes of your presentation should be a slide presentation that provides a postmortem of your game production. A postmortem is a review of your game development process. In the postmortem, you identify the following:

• What you wanted to do at the very beginning.
• What you were actually able to achieve and how it differed.
• What prevented you from achieving those goals.
• What you would have done differently if you could do it again.

To give you some idea of the types of questions you should be answering, here are some postmortems for a couple of commercial games. These are clearly essay format, which is not what we want. We just want slides from you with the high-level bullet points. In other words, your slides should look like the bolded parts of these essays and you should talk about the non-bolded parts.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

This is a postmortem for the relaunch of the classic RPG Baldur's Gate (published in 2000) on tablets and modern OS's. The sequel to this game (which was released for tablets by the same team) is considered by many people to be one of the greatest western RPGs ever made.

Rocketbowl

This independent game was the 2005 winner for Technical Excellence at the Independent Games Festival. It is simple and straight-forward.

Oasis

Oasis was the winner of the IGF's 2004 Game of the Year and Innovation in Game Design awards in the web/downloadable category. It has also been used as a case study in past semesters of CIS 3000.

Presentation Schedule

As with previous presentations, there will be about 17 minutes allocated for each group. However, because there is no class on Wednesday, we have had to schedule an extra class on Monday to make up for the missing class. One last time, the schedule is as follows.

Monday (May 6)

Lecture (10:10-11:00am)

• HEDG (Roasted!)
• Ralph Studios (Starstruck)
• FXN (Loxodonta)

Evening (5-6pm in Hollister 110)

• FlashLight Studios (Amaris: Realm of Dreams)
• The Syndicate (Perceptron)
• Snapback Studios (Clerical Error)

Tuesday (May 7)

Section 201 (11:15-12:05pm)

• Super Glue Studio (Tower Offense)
• One Fortune Games (Kamachi)
• LUMEN Studios (YoyoBoy)

Section 202 (12:20-1:10pm)

• OneWordStudios (Flourish)
• Triton Games (Prism Break)
• 7Studio (Undetected)

Submission

Due: Wednesday, May 8th at 11:59 pm

We would like you to make another release for your game. We will play this game the day after Slope Day and give you grade feedback. You can use that feedback to polish the game before Showcase.

In addition, we would like your slides that you made for the presentation. Submit a file called postmortem. This file should be a PDF, just like all previous submissions.

Finally, you should not forget to turn in your last two week report. This will help us in determining final grades at the end of the course.